■I 





lilassPN'ICa, 
Rnnk . o 4 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



ESSAYS ON 
GREAT WRITERS 



BY 



HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK, Jr. 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1903 






z^ 
^ 




THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 

Two Copies Receiver; 

SEP 9 1903 

/^Copyntm Entry 
CUSS cu XXc. No 

tyssg 

COPY B. 



COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY HENRY DWIGHT SEDGWICK, JR. 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published, September, igoj 



To 
MY FATHER 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Lockhart's Life of Scott 1 

D'Annunzio, Novelist 39 

Montaigne .93 

Macaulay 139 

English and French Literature . . . 199 

Don Quixote 233 

A Holiday with Montaigne .... 263 

Some Aspects of Thackeray .... 309 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OP SCOTT 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 



It is wholly fit that Americans should go 
on pilgrimage to Abbotsford. A remem- 
brance of virtue is there which we, at least, 
cannot find at Canterbury, Lourdes, or Loreto. 
There is but one comparable spot in Great 
Britain, and that is on the banks of Avon ; 
but at Stratford, encompassed by memorials 
of idolatry, surrounded by restoration and 
renovation, harried and jostled by tourists, 
the pilgrim wearily passes from bust to por- 
trait, from Halliwell to Furness, from side- 
board to second-best bedstead, with a sick 
sense of human immortality, till his eye 
fights upon the " W. Scott " scrawled on the 
window-pane. If Walter Scott made this 
pilgrimage, if his feet limped through the 
churchyard of Holy Trinity, if he looked at 
the ugly busts, if he, too, was elbowed by 

1 Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, by John Gibson 
Lockhart. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & 
Co. 1902. 5 vols. 



4 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

American women there, then welcome all, the 
sun shines fair on Stratford again. 

Abbotsf ord has discomforts of its own, but 
there one has glimpses of Scott's abounding 
personality. How wonderful was that per- 
sonality; how it sunned and warmed and 
breathed balm upon the lean and Cassius- 
like Lockhart, till that sweetened man became 
transfigured, as it were, and wrote one of 
the most acceptable and happy books of the 
world ; — a personality, so rich and ripe, that 
nature of necessity encased it in lovable 
form and features. In the National Portrait 
Gallery is a good picture of Scott, large- 
browed, blue-eyed, ruddy-hued, the great out- 
of-door genius ; one of his dogs looks up at 
him with sagacious appreciation. There is 
the large free figure, but what can a painter 
with all his art tell us of a person whom we 
love ? How can he describe the noble career 
from boyhood to death ; how can he deline- 
ate the wit, the laughter, the generosity, the 
high devotion, the lofty character, the dog- 
ged resolution, and the womanly tenderness 
of heart? The biographer has the harder 
task. A hundred great portraits have been 
painted, from Masaccio to John Sargent, but 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 5 

the great biographies are a half dozen, and 
one of the best is this book of Lockhart's. 

As generations roll on, the past drifts 
more and more from the field of our vision ; 
the England of Scott's day has become a 
classic time, the subjects of George III. are 
strangers of foreign habits ; tastes change, 
customs alter, books multiply, and with all 
the rest the Waverley Novels likewise show 
their antique dress and betray their mortality ; 
but the life of a great man never loses its 
interest. As a time recedes into remoteness, 
its books, saving the few on which time has 
no claim, become unreadable, but a man's 
life retains and tightens its hold upon us. 
It is hardly too much to say that Lockhart 
has done for Scott's fame almost as much as 
Scott himself. The greatest of Scotsmen in 
thirty novels and half a dozen volumes of 
poetry has sketched his own lineaments, but 
Lockhart has filled out that sketch with neces- 
sary amplification, admiring and just. What 
would we not give for such a biography of 
Homer or Virgil, of Dante or Shakespeare ? 
But if we possessed one, dare we hope for a 
record of so much virtue and happiness, of 
so much honor and heroic duty? 



6 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

Walter Scott is not only a novelist, not 
only a bountiful purveyor of enjoyment ; his 
life sheds a light as well as a lustre on 
England. Of right he ought to be seated on 
St. George's horse, and honored as Britain's 
patron saint, for he represents what Britain's 
best should be, he, the loyal man, the constant 
friend, joyous in youth, laborious in manhood, 
high-minded in the sad decadent years, think- 
ing no evil, and faithful with the greatest 
faith, that in virtue for virtue's sake. Every 
English-speaking person should be familiar 
with that noble life. 

One sometimes wonders if a change might 
not without hurt be made in the studies of 
boys ; whether Greek composition, or even 
solid geometry, — studies rolled upward like 
a stone to roll down again at the year's end 
with a glorious splash into the pool of obliv- 
ion, — might not be discontinued, and in its 
stead a course of biography be put. Boys 
should read and read again the biographies 
of good men. The first two should be the 
History of Don Quixote and Lockhart's Life 
of Scott. In young years, so fortified against 
enclitics and angles, yet unfolding and docile 
to things which touch the heart, would not the 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 7 

boy derive as much benefit from an enthusi- 
astic perusal of Lockhart's volumes as from 
disheartening attempts to escalade the irregu- 
lar aorist ? It was not for nothing that the 
wise Jesuits bade their young scholars read 
the Lives of the Saints. Are there no les- 
sons to be learned for the living of life ? 

Don Quixote and Sir Walter Scott look 
very unlike, one with his cracked brain and 
the other with his shrewd good sense, but 
they have this in common, that Don Quixote 
is an heroic man whose heroism is obscured 
by craziness and by the irony under which 
Cervantes hid his own great beliefs, while 
Scott is an heroic man, whose heroism is 
obscured by success and by the happiness 
under which he concealed daily duty faith- 
fully done. In the good school of hero-wor- 
ship these men supplement one another, the 
proud Spaniard, the canny Scot, great-hearted 
gentlemen both. Our affection for them is 
less a matter of argument than of instinct ; 
their worthiness is demonstrated by our love. 
I cannot prove to you my joy in the month 
of May; if you feel dismal and Novem- 
brish, why, turn up your collar and shiver 
lustily. The Spaniard is rather for men 



8 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

who have failed as this world judges; the 
Scot for those who live in the sunshine of 
life. 

English civilization, which with all its im- 
perfections is to many of us the best, is a slow- 
growing plant; though pieced and patched 
with foreign graftings, it still keeps the same 
sap which has brought forth fruit this thou- 
sand years. It has fashioned certain ideals of 
manhood, which, while changing clothes and 
speech and modes of action, maintain a resem- 
blance, an English type, not to be likened to 
foreign ideals, beautiful as those may be ; we 
have much to learn from those great examples, 
but the noble type of the English is different. 
Sir Thomas Malory's Round Table, Philip 
Sidney, Falkland, Russell, Howard the philan- 
thropist, Robertson the priest, Gordon the 
soldier, — choose whom you will, — have a 
national type, not over-flexible, but of a most 
enduring temper. The traditions which have 
gathered about these men have wrought a 
type of English gentleman which we honor 
in our unreasonable hearts. Our ideals are 
tardy and antiquated ; they savor of the past, 
of the long feudal past. We listen politely 
to the introducer of new doctrines of right- 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 9 

eousness, of new principles of morality, and 
nod a cold approval, " How noble ! " €i What 
a fine fellow ! " " Excellent man ! " but there 
is no touch of that enthusiasm with which 
we cry, " There ! there is a gentleman ! " A 
foolish method, no doubt, and worthy of 
the raps and raillery it receives, but it is 
the English way. Educated men, with their 
exact training in sociology and science, 
smile at us, mock us, bewail us, and still our 
cheeks flush with pleasure as we behold 
on some conspicuous stage the old type of 
English hero ; and we feel, ignorantly, that 
there is no higher title than that of gentle- 
man, no better code of ethics than that of 
chivalry, rooted though it be on the absurd 
distinction between the man on horseback 
and the man on foot. 

The great cause of Sir Walter Scott's pop- 
ularity during life and fame after death is 
that he put into words the chivalric ideas 
of England, that he declared in poem, in 
romance, and in his actions, the honorable 
service rendered by the Cavalier to society, 
and so he stirred the deep instinctive affec- 
tions — prejudices if you will — of British 
conservatism. He founded the Eomantic 



10 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

School in Great Britain, not because he was 
pricked on by Border Ballads or by Gotz von 
Berlichingen, but because, descended from 
the Flower of Yarrow and great-grandson of 
a Killiecrankie man, he had been born and 
bred a British gentleman, with all his poetic 
nature sensitive to the beauty and charm of 
chivalry. History as seen by a poet is quite 
different from history as seen by a Social 
Democrat ; and the Cavalier — if we may 
draw distinctions that do not touch any 
question of merit — requires a historian of 
different temper and of different education 
from the historian of the clerk or the plough- 
man. The youth filled with rich enthusi- 
asm for life, kindled into physical joy by a 
hot gallop, quickened by a fine and tender 
sympathy between man and beast, crammed 
with fresh air, health, and delight, vivified 
with beauty of April willows and autumnal 
heather, is remote, stupidly remote perhaps, 
from the scrivener at his desk, or the laborer 
with his hoe. The difference is not just, it 
is not in accord with sociological theories, it 
must pass away; yet it has existed in the 
past and still survives in the present, and 
a Cavalier to most of us is the accepted type 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 11 

of gentleman, and " chivalric " is still the 
proudest adjective of praise. Of this sec- 
tion of life Sir Walter Scott is the great his- 
torian, and he became its historian, not so 
much because he was of it, as because he 
delighted in it with all his qualities of heart 
and head. 

We still linger in the obscurity of the 
shadow cast by the Feudal Period ; we cannot 
avoid its errors, let us not forget the virtues 
which it prescribes ; let us remember the pre- 
cepts of chivalry, truth-telling, honor, devo- 
tion, enthusiasm, compassion, reckless self- 
sacrifice for an ideal, love of one woman, and 
affection for the horse. For such learning 
there is no textbook like this Life of Scott. 
Moreover, in Lockhart's biography, we are 
studying the English humanities, we learn 
those special qualities which directed Scott's 
genius, those tastes and inclinations which, 
combining with his talents, enabled him to 
shift the course of English literature from 
its eighteenth-century shallows into what is 
known as the Romantic movement. 

It is a satisfaction that America should 
render to Scott's memory the homage of this 
new edition of Lockhart with generous print, 



12 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

broad margin, and that comfortable weight 
that gives the hand a share in the pleasure 
of the book and yet exacts no further ser- 
vice. What would the boy Walter Scott 
have said, if in vision these stately volumes, 
like Banquo's issue royally appareled, had 
risen before him one after one, to interrupt 
his urchin warfare in the streets of Edin- 
burgh? But the physical book, admirable 
as it is, equipped for dress parade and some- 
what ostentatious in its pride of office, is 
but the porter of its contents. Miss Susan 
M. Francis, with pious care, excellent judg- 
ment, and sound discrimination, worthy 
indeed of the true disciple, has done just 
what other disciples have long been wishing 
for. At appropriate places in the text, as if 
Lockhart had paused to let Miss Francis step 
forward and speak, come, in modest guise as 
footnotes, pertinent passages from Scott's 
Journal, and letters from Lady Louisa Stuart, 
John Murray, and others. The Familiar Let- 
ters, the Journal, and many a book to which 
Lockhart had no access, have supplied Miss 
Francis with the material for these rich addi- 
tions. The reader's pleasure is proof of the 
great pains, good taste, and long experience 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 13 

put to use in compiling these notes. The 
editor's is an honest service honorably per- 
formed. As a consequence — and perhaps I 
speak as one of many — I now possess an 
edition of Lockhart which, strong in text, 
notes, and form, may make bold to stand 
on the shelf beside what for me is the edi- 
tion of the Waverley Novels. This edition 
published in Boston — it bears the name 
Samuel H. Parker — has a binding which 
by some ordinance of Nature or of Time, 
the two great givers of rights, has come to 
be the proper dress of the Waverley Novels. 
Its color varies from a deep mahogany to the 
lighter hues of the horse-chestnut ; what it 
may have been before it was tinted by the 
hands of three generations cannot be guessed. 
This ripe color has penetrated within and 
stained the pages with its shifting browns. 
It is plain that Time has pored and paused 
over these volumes, hesitating whether he 
should not lay aside his scythe ; he will travel 
far before he shall find again so pleasant a 
resting-place. This Parker edition used to 
stand on a shelf between two windows, with 
unregarded books above and below. On 
another bookcase stood the Ticknor and Fields 



U LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

edition of Lockhart, 1851, its back bedecked 
with claymores and a filibeg, or some such 
thing ; the designer seems to have thought 
that Scott was a Highland chief. But, 
though exceeding respectable, that edition 
was obviously of lower rank than the Parker 
edition of the novels ; be-claymored and fili- 
begged it stood apart and ignored, while the 
novels were taken out as if they had been 
ballroom belles. In fact, there is something 
feminine, something almost girlish, about a 
delightful book ; without wooing it will not 
yield the full measure of its sweetness. In 
those days we always made proper prepara- 
tion — a boy's method of courtship — to read 
Scott. The proper preparation — but who 
has not discovered it for himself ? — is to be 
young, and to put an apple, a gillyflower, into 
the right pocket, two slices of buttered bread, 
quince jam between, into the left, thrust the 
mahogany volume into the front pouch of 
the sailor suit, then, carefully protecting 
these protuberant burdens, shinny up into a 
maple-tree, and there among the branches, 
hidden by the leaves, which half hinder and 
half invite the warm, green sunshine, sit 
noiseless ; the body be-appled and be-jammed 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 15 

into quiescent sympathy, while the elated 
spirit swims dolphin-like over the glorious 
sea of romance. That one true way of read- 
ing the Waverley Novels poor Mr. Howells 
never knew. He must have read them, if he 
has read them at all, seated on a high stool, 
rough and hard, with teetering legs, in a 
dentist's parlor. He has had need to draw a 
prodigal portion from his Fortunatus's purse 
of our respect and affection to justify his 
wayward obliquity toward Scott. I wish that 
I were in a sailor's blouse again, that I might 
shinny back into that maple-tree, in the com- 
pany of Mr. Howells, with Miss Francis's 
volumes of Lockhart (one at a time), to read 
and re-read the story of Sir Walter Scott, 
and feel again the joy which comes from the 
perusal of a biography written by a wise 
lover and edited by a wise disciple, with no 
break in the chain of affection between us 
and the object of our veneration. Perhaps 
Miss Francis would do us the honor to take 
a ladder and join our party. But youth and 
jam and gillyflowers are luxuries soon spent, 
and Miss Francis has done her best to make 
amends for their evanescence. She has done 
a public kindness, and she has had a double 



16 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

reward, first, in living in familiar converse 
with Scott's spirit, second, in the thanks which 
must come to her thick and fast from all 
Scott lovers. 

We might well wish that every young man 
and every boy were reading these big-printed 
volumes, adorned with pictures of our hero, 
of his friends, both men and dogs, and of 
the places where he lived. Let a man econo- 
mize on his sons' clothes, on their puddings 
and toys, but the wise father is prodigal with 
books. A good book should have the pomp 
and circumstance of its rank, it should be- 
tray its gentle condition to the most casual 
beholder, so that he who sees it on a shelf 
shall be tempted to stretch forth his hand, 
and having grasped this fruit of an innocent 
tree of knowledge, shall eat, digest, and be- 
come a wiser, a happier, and a better man 

or boy. 

II 

Without meaning to disparage the Future, 
— it will have its flatterers, — or the Pre- 
sent, which is so importunately with us al- 
ways, there is much reason with those who 
think that the home of poetry is in the Past. 
There our sentiments rest, like rays of light 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 17 

which fall through storied windows and lie 
in colored melancholy upon ancient tombs. 
That which was once a poor, barren Present, 
no better than our own, gains richness and 
mystery, and, as it drifts through twilight 
shades beyond the disturbing reach of hu- 
man recollection, grows in refinement, in 
tenderness, in nobility. Memory is the great 
purgatory ; in it the commonness, the trivi- 
ality of daily happenings become cleansed 
and ennobled, and our petty lives, gliding 
back into the Eden from which they seem to 
issue, become altogether innocent and beau- 
tiful. 

In this world of memory there is an aris- 
tocracy ; there are ephemeral things and long- 
lived things, there is existence in every grade 
of duration, but almost all on this great back- 
ward march gain in beauty and interest. It 
is so in the memory of poets, it is so with 
everybody. There is a fairy, benevolent and 
solemn, who presides over memory ; she is 
capricious and fantastic, too, and busies her- 
self with the little as well as with the big 
things of life. If we look back on our 
boarding-school days, what do we remem- 
ber ? Certainly not our lessons, nor the re- 



18 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

bukes of our weary teachers, nor the once 
everlasting study hour ; but we recall every 
detail of the secret descent down the fire- 
escape to the village pastry-cook's, where, 
safeguarded by a system of signals stretch- 
ing continuous to the point of danger, we 
hurriedly swallowed creamcakes, Washing- 
ton pies, raspberry turnovers, and then with 
smeared lips and skulking gait stealthily 
crept and climbed back to a sleep such as 
few of the just enjoy. 

This fairy of memory was potent with 
Walter Scott. He loved the Past, he never 
spoke of it but with admiration and respect, 
he studied it, explored it, honored it; not 
the personal Past, which our egotism loves, 
but the great Past of his countrymen. This 
sentiment is the master quality in his nov- 
els, and gives them their peculiar interest. 
There have been plenty of historical novels, 
but none others bear those tender marks 
of filial affection which characterize the Wa- 
verley Novels. 

There is another quality in Scott closely 
connected with his feeling for the Past, 
which we in America, with our democratic 
doctrines, find it more difficult to appreciate 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 19 

justly. This quality, respect for rank, — a 
very inadequate and inexact phrase, — is 
part and parcel of a social condition very 
different from our own. Scott had an open, 
generous admiration for that diversity which 
gave free play to the virtues of loyalty and 
gratitude on one side, and of protection and 
solicitude on the other. The Scottish laird 
and his cotters had reciprocal duties ; instead 
of crying " Each man for himself ! " they 
enjoyed their mutual dependence. The tie 
of chieftain and clansman bore no great dis- 
similarity to that of father and son, new 
affections were called out, a gillie took pride 
in his chief, and the chief was fond of his 
gillie. 

Scott's respect for rank was as far removed 
from snobbery as he from Hecuba; it was 
not only devoid of all meanness, but it had 
a childlike, a solemn, and admirable element, 
a kind of acceptance of society as established 
by the hand of God. Added to this solemn 
acceptance was his artistic pleasure in the 
picturesque variety and gradation of rank, 
as in a prospect where the ground rises from 
flatness, over undulating meadows, to roll- 
ing hills and ranges of mountains. It is ex- 



20 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

hilarating to behold even seeming greatness, 
and the perspective of rank throws into high 
relief persons of birth and office, and cun- 
ningly produces the effect of greatness. 
That patriotism which clings to flag or king, 
with Scott attached itself to the social order. 
He was intensely loyal to the structure of 
society in which he lived, not because he 
was happy and prosperous under it, but be- 
cause to him it was noble and beautiful. 
When a project for innovations in the law 
courts was proposed, he was greatly moved. 
" No, no," said he to Jeffrey, " little by lit- 
tle, whatever your wishes may be, you will 
destroy and undermine, until nothing of what 
makes Scotland Scotland shall remain ; " and 
the tears gushed down his cheeks. The 
social system of clanship, "We Scots are a 
clannish body," made this sentiment easy; 
he felt toward his chief and his clan as a 
veteran feels toward his colonel and his regi- 
ment. 

To Scott's historic sentiment and tender- 
ness of feeling for the established social 
order was added a love of place, begotten 
of associations with pleasant Teviotdale, the 
Tweed, Leader Haughs, the Braes of Yar- 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 21 

row, bequeathed from generation to genera- 
tion. We Americans, men of migratory 
habits, who do not live where our fathers 
have lived, or, if so, pull their houses down 
that we may build others with modern lux- 
ury, are strangers to the deep sentiment 
which a Scotsman cherishes for his home ; 
— not the mere stones and timber, which 
keep him dry and warm, but the hearth at 
which his mother and his forefathers sat and 
took their ease after the labor of the day, the 
ancient trees about the porch, the heather 
and honeysuckle, the highroad down which 
galloped the post with news of Waterloo and 
Culloden, the little brooks of border min- 
strelsy, and the mountains of legend ; we do 
not share his inward feeling that his soul is 
bound to the soul of the place by some rite 
celebrated long before his birth, that for 
better or worse they two are mated, and not 
without some hidden injury can anything 
but death part them. Perhaps such feelings 
are childish, they certainly are not modish 
according to our American notions, but over 
those who entertain them they are royally 
tyrannical. It was so with Scott, and though 
when left to ourselves we may not feel that 



22 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

feeling, he teaches us a lively sympathy with 
it, and gives us a deeper desire to have what 
we may really call a home. 

Scott also possessed a great theatrical im- 
agination. He looked on life as from an 
upper window, and watched the vast histori- 
cal pageant march along; his eye caught 
notable persons, dramatic incidents, pictur- 
esque episodes, with the skill of a sagacious 
theatre manager. Not the drama of con- 
science, not the meetings and maladjust- 
ments of different temperaments and person- 
alities, not the whims of an over-civilized 
psychology, not the sensitive indoor happen- 
ings of life : but scenes that startle the eye, 
alarm the ear, and keep every sense on the 
alert ; the objective bustle and much ado 
of life; the striking effects which contrast 
clothes as well as character, bringing to- 
gether Highlander and Lowlander, Crusader 
and Saracen, jesters, prelates, turnkeys, and 
foresters. That is why the Waverley Novels 
divide honors with the theatre in a boy's life. 
I can remember how easy seemed the transi- 
tion from my thumbed and dog-eared " Guy 
Mannering" to the front row of the pit, 
which my impatience reached in ample time to 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 23 

study the curtain resplendent with Boccaccio's 
garden before it was lifted on a wonderful 
world of romance wherein the jeune premier 
stepped forward like Frank Osbaldistone, Sir 
Kenneth, or any of " my insipidly imbecile 
young men," as Scott called them, to play 
his difficult, ungrateful part, just as they 
did, with awkwardness and self-conscious in- 
ability, while the audience passed him by, as 
readers do in the Waverley Novels, to gaze 
on the glittering mise en scene, and watch 
the real heroes of the piece. 

The melodramatic theatre indicates certain 
fundamental truths of human nature. We 
have inherited traits of the savage, we de- 
light in crimson and sounding brass, in sol- 
diers and gypsies, nor can we conceal, if we 
would, another and nearer ancestry, " The 
child is father to the man : " the laws of 
childhood govern us still, and it is to this 
common nature of Child and Man that Scott 
appeals so strongly. 

" Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! 
To all the sensual world proclaim, 
One crowded hour of glorious life 
Is worth an age without a name." 

Scott was a master of the domain of simple 



24 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

theatrical drama. What is there more effec- 
tive than his bravado scenes, which we watch 
with that secret sympathy for bragging with 
which we used to watch the big boys at 
school, for we know that the biggest words 
will be seconded by deeds. " Touch Ralph 
de Vipont's shield — touch the Hospitaller's 
shield ; he is your cheapest bargain." " ' Who 
has dared/ said Richard, laying his hands 
upon the Austrian standard, ' who has dared 
to place this paltry rag beside the banner of 
England? ' " " ' Die, bloodthirsty dog! ' said 
Balfour, ' die as thou hast lived ! die, like the 
beasts that perish — hoping nothing — be- 
lieving nothing ' — ( And fearing nothing ! ' 
said Bothwell." These, and a hundred such 
passages, are very simple, but simple with a 
simplicity not easy to attain ; they touch the 
young barbarian in us to the quick. 

In addition to these traits, Scott had that 
shrewd practical understanding which is said 
to mark the Scotsman. Some acute contem- 
porary said that " Scott's sense was more 
wonderful than his genius." In fact, his 
sense is so all-pervasive that it often renders 
the reader blind to the imaginative qualities 
that spread their great wings throughout 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 25 

most of the novels. It was this good sense 
that enabled Scott to supply the admirable 
framework of his stories, for it taught him 
to understand the ways of men, — farmers, 
shopkeepers, lawyers, soldiers, lairds, gra- 
ziers, smugglers, — to perceive how all parts 
of society are linked together, and to trace 
the social nerves that connect the shepherd 
and the blacksmith with historic personages. 
Scott had great powers of observation, but 
these powers, instead of being allowed to 
yield at their own will to the temptation of 
the moment, were always under the control 
of good sense. This controlled observation, 
aided by the extraordinary healthiness of his 
nature, enabled him to look upon life with 
so much largeness, and never suffered his 
fancy to wander off and fasten on some sore 
spot in the body social, or on some morbid 
individual ; but held it fixed on healthy so- 
ciety, on sanity and equilibrium. Natural, 
healthy life always drew upon Scott's abun- 
dant sympathy. Dandie Dinmont, Mr. Old- 
buck, Baillie Jarvie, and a hundred more 
show the greatest pigment of art, the good 
color of health. Open a novel almost at 
random and you meet a sympathetic under- 



26 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

standing. For example, a fisher worn an is 
pleading for a dram of whiskey : " Ay, ay, 
— it 's easy for your honor, and like o' you 
gentlefolks, to say sae, that hae stouth and 
routh, and fire and fending, and meat and 
claith, and sit dry and canny by the fireside. 
But an* ye wanted fire and meat and dry 
claise, and were deeing o' cauld, and had a 
sair heart, whilk is warst ava', wi' just tip- 
pence in your pouch, wadna ye be glad to 
buy a dram wi' it, to be eilding and claise, 
and a supper and heart's ease into the bar- 
gain till the morn's morning ? " 

It is easy to disparage common sense and 
the art of arousing boyish interest, just as it 
is easy to disparage romantic affections for 
the past, for rank, and for place ; but Scott 
had a power which transfigured common 
sense, theatrical imagination, and conserva- 
tive sentiments, — - Scott was a poet. His 
poetic genius has given him one great ad- 
vantage over all other English novelists. As 
we think of the famous names, Fielding, 
Kichardson, Jane Austen, Thackeray, Dick- 
ens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mere- 
dith ; according to our taste, our education, 
or our whimsies, we prefer this quality in 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 27 

one, we enjoy that in another, and we may, 
as many do, put others above Scott in the 
hierarchy of English novelists, but nobody, 
not even the most intemperate, will compare 
any one of them with Scott as a poet. Scott 
had great lyrical gifts. It has been remarked 
how many of his poems Mr. Palgrave has 
inserted in the " Golden Treasury." Pal- 
grave did well. There are few poems that 
have the peculiar beauty of Scott's lyrics. 
Take, for example, — 

" A weary lot is thine, fair maid, 

A weary lot is thine ! 
To pull the thorn thy brow to braid, 

And press the rue for wine. 
A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien, 

A feather of the blue, 
A doublet of the Lincoln green — 

No more of me you knew, 

My love ! 

No more of me you knew." 

What maiden could resist 

" A lightsome eye, a soldier's mien, 
A feather of the blue ? " 

Scott's poetic nature, delicate and charm- 
ing as it is in his lyrics, picturesque and 
vigorous as it is in his long poems, finds its 
sturdier and most natural expression in his 
novels ; in them it refines the prodigal dis- 



28 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

play of pictorial life, it bestows lightness and 
vividness, it gives an atmosphere of beauty, 
and a joyful exhilaration of enfranchise- 
ment from the commonplace ; it mingles the 
leaven of poetry into ordinary life, and 
causes what we call romance. Take, for 
example, a subject like war. War, as it is, 
commissariat, dysentery, mule- trains, six- 
pounders, disemboweled boys,reconcentration, 
water-cure, lying, and swindling, has been 
described by Zola and Tolstoi with the skill 
of that genius which is faithful to the naked- 
ness of fact. But for the millions who do 
not go to the battlefield, hospital, or burial- 
ditch, war is another matter ; for them it is 
a brilliant affair of colors, drums, uniforms, 
courage, enthusiasm, heroism, and victory ; 
it is the most brilliant of stage-shows, the 
most exciting of games. This is the familiar 
conception of war ; and Scott has expressed 
his thorough sympathy with immense poeti- 
cal skill. Let the sternest Quaker read the 
battle scene in " Marmion," and he will feel 
his temper glow with warlike ardor ; and the 
fighting in the novels, for instance the battle 
in " Old Mortality," is still better. In like 
manner in the pictures of Highland life the 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 29 

style may be poor, the workmanship careless, 
but we are always aware that what we read 
has been written by one who looked upon 
what he describes with a poet's eye. 

The poetry that animates the Waverley 
Novels was not, as with some men, a rare 
accomplishment kept for literary use, but lay 
deep in Scott's life. As a young man he 
fell in love with a lady who loved and mar- 
ried another, and all his life her memory, 
etherealized no doubt after the manner of 
poets and lovers, stayed with him, so that 
despite the greatest worldly success his finer 
happiness lay in imagination. But as he 
appeared at Abbotsford, gayest among the 
gay, prince of good fellows, what comrade 
conjectured that the poet had not attained 
his heart's desire? 

Ill 

It is easy to find fault with Scott ; he has 
taken no pains to hide the bounds of his 
genius. He was careless to slovenliness, he 
hardly ever corrected his pages, he worked 
with a glad animal energy, writing two or 
three hours before breakfast every morn- 
ing, chiefly in order to free himself from the 



30 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

pressure of his fancy. So lightly did he go 
to work that when taken sick after writing 
"The Bride of Lammermoor " he forgot all 
but the outline of the plot. His pen coursed 
like a greyhound ; at times it lost the scent 
of the story and strayed away into tedious 
prologue and peroration, or in endless talk, 
and then, the scent regained, it dashed on 
into a scene of unequaled vigor and imagina- 
tion. There are few speeches that can rank 
with that of Jeanie Deans to Queen Caroline : 
" But when the hour of trouble comes to the 
mind or to the body — and seldom may it 
visit your Leddyship — and when the hour 
of death comes, that comes to high and low 
— lang and late may it be yours — my 
Leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for 
oursells, but what we hae dune for others, 
that we think on maist pleasantly. And the 
thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the 
puir thing's life will be sweeter in that hour, 
come when it may, than if a word of your 
mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at 
the tail of ae tow." 

Scott was a vigorous, happy man, who 
rated life far higher than literature, and 
looked upon novel-writing as a money-getting 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 31 

operation. " ' I 'd rather be a kitten and cry 
Mew/ " he said, " than write the best poetry 
in the world on condition of laying aside 
common sense in the ordinary transactions 
and business of the world." He would have 
entertained pity, not untouched by scorn, for 
those novelists who apply to a novel the rules 
that govern a lyric, and come home fatigued 
from a day spent in seeking an adjective. 
Scott wrote with what is called inspiration ; 
when he had written, his mind left his manu- 
script and turned to something new. No 
doubt we wish that it had been otherwise, 
that Scott, in addition to his imaginative 
power, had also possessed the faculty of self- 
criticism ; perhaps Nature has adopted some 
self-denying ordinance, that, where she is so 
prodigal with her right hand, she will be 
somewhat niggard with the left. We are 
hard to please if we demand that she shall 
add the delicate art of Stevenson to the virile 
power of Walter Scott. 

There is a second fault ; archaeologists 
tell us that no man ever spoke like King 
Eichard, Ivanhoe, and Locksley. Scott, how- 
ever, has erred in good company. Did Moses 
and David speak as the Old Testament nar- 



32 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

rates ? Did knights-errant ever utter such 
words as Malory puts into the mouth of 
Perceval ? Or did the real Antony have 
the eloquence of Shakespeare? Historical 
and archaeological mistakes are serious in 
history and archaeology, and shockingly dis- 
figure examination papers, hut in novels the 
standards are different. Perhaps men learned 
in demonology are put out of patience by 
" Paradise Lost " and the " Inferno," and 
scholars in fairy lore vex themselves over 
Ariel and Titania ; but " Ivanhoe " is like a 
picture, which at a few feet shows blotches 
and daubs, but looked at from the proper 
distance, shows the correct outline and the 
true color. The raw conjunction of Saxon 
and Norman, the story how the two great 
stocks of Englishmen went housekeeping 
together, is told better than in any history. 
So it is with " The Talisman." The picture 
of the crusading invasion of Palestine is no 
doubt wholly incorrect in all details, and yet 
what book equals it in enabling us to under- 
stand the romantic attitude of Europe and the 
great popular Christian sentiment which ex- 
pressed itself in unchristian means and built 
so differently from what it knew ? But we 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 33 

need not quarrel in defense of " Ivanhoe," 
or " Quentin Durward," or " The Talisman." 
Unquestionably the Scottish novels are the 
best, " Rob Roy," " Guy Mannering," " The 
Antiquary," " Old MortaHty," " The Heart 
of Mid-Lothian ; " in them we find portraiture 
of character, drawn with an art that must 
satisfy the most difficult advocate of studies 
from life ; and probably all of Scott's famous 
characters were drawn from life. 

A more serious charge is that Scott is not 
interested in the soul; that the higher do- 
mains of human faculties, love and religion, 
are treated not at all or else inadequately. 
At first sight there seems to be much justice 
in this complaint, for if our minds run over 
the names of the Waverley Novels, — the 
very titles, like a romantic tune, play a mel- 
ody of youth, — we remember no love scene 
of power, nor any lovable woman except 
Diana Vernon, and the religion in them is 
too much like that which fills up our own 
Sunday mornings between the fishballs of 
breakfast and the cold roast beef of dinner. 
Carlyle has expressed his dissatisfaction with 
Scott's shortcomings, after the manner of an 
eloquent advocate who sets forth his case, 



34 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

and leaves the jury to get at justice as best 
they may. He denies that Scott touches the 
spiritual or ethical side of life, and therefore 
condemns him. But Carlyle does not look 
for ethics except in exhortations, nor for 
spiritual life except in a vociferous crying 
after God ; whereas the soul is wayward and 
strays outside of metaphysics and of right- 
eous indignation. That Scott himself was a 
good man, in a very high and solemn signifi- 
cance of those words, cannot be questioned 
by any one who has read his biography and 
letters. No shadow of self-deception clouded 
his mind when, in moments of great physical 
pain, he said, "I should be a great fool, 
and a most ungrateful wretch, to complain 
of such inflictions as these. My life has 
been in all its private and public relations as 
fortunate, perhaps, as was ever lived, up to 
this period ; and whether pain or misfortune 
may lie behind the dark curtain of futurity, 
I am already a sufficient debtor to the bounty 
of Providence to be resigned to it;" nor 
when he thought he was dying, " For my- 
self I am unconscious of ever having done 
any man an injury or omitted any fair oppor- 
tunity of doing any man a benefit." Every 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 35 

one knows his last words, " Lockhart, be a 
good man — be virtuous — be religious — 
be a good man. Nothing else will give you 
any comfort when you come to lie here." 

Ethics have two methods: one is the way of 
the great Hebrew prophets who cry, "Woe 
to the children of this world ! Repent, re- 
pent ! " and Carlyle's figure, as he follows 
their strait and narrow way, shows very 
heroic on the skyline of life ; but there is 
still room for those teachers of ethics who 
follow another method, who do not fix their 
eyes on the anger of God, but on the beauti- 
ful world which He has created. To them 
humanity is not vile, nor this earth a magni- 
fied Babylon ; they look for virtue and they 
find it ; they see childhood ruddy-cheeked 
and light-hearted, youth idealized by the 
enchantment of first love ; they rejoice in a 
wonderful world ; they laugh with those who 
laugh, weep with mourners, dance with the 
young, are crutches to the old, tell stories to 
the moping, throw jests to the jolly, comfort 
cold hearts, and leave everywhere a ripening 
warmth like sunlight, and a faith that happi- 
ness is its own justification. This was the 
way of Walter Scott. 



36 LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 

No doubt spiritual life can express itself 
in cries and prophecies, yet for most men, 
looking over chequered lives, or into the re- 
cesses of their own hearts, the spiritual life 
is embodied not in loud exhortations and 
threats, but rather in honor, loyalty, truth ; 
and those who let this belief appear in their 
daily life are entitled to the name, toward 
which they are greatly indifferent, of spiritual 
teachers. Honor, loyalty, truth, were very 
dear to Walter Scott ; his love for them ap- 
pears throughout his biography. He says, 
" It is our duty to fight on, doing what good 
we can and trusting to God Almighty, whose 
grace ripens the seeds we commit to the 
earth, that our benefactions shall bear fruit." 
Among the good seeds Scott committed to 
the earth are his novels, which, if they are 
not spiritual, according to the significance 
of that word as used by prophet and priest, 
have that in them which has helped genera- 
tions of young men to admire manliness, 
purity, fair play, and honor, and has strength- 
ened their inward resolutions to think no 
unworthy thoughts, to do no unworthy 
deeds. Literature, not preaching, has been 
the great civilizer ; if it has not been as 



LOCKHART'S LIFE OF SCOTT 37 

quick to kindle enthusiasm for large causes, 
it has acted with greater sureness and has 
built more permanently; and of all the great 
names in literature as a power for good, who 
shall come next to Shakespeare, Dante, and 
Cervantes, if not Walter Scott ? 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 



U ( 



Tom Jones ' and Gray's i Elegy in a 
Country Churchyard ' are both excellent, and 
much spoke of by both sex, particularly by the 
men." This statement by Marjorie Fleming 
has abundant confirmation in the history of 
English literature for the last hundred and 
fifty years. And although this nineteenth 
century of ours has enjoyed throwing a great 
many stones at the eighteenth, we must ac- 
knowledge that we cannot find in English 
literature another novel and another poem 
that, taken together, give us a fuller know- 
ledge of English-speaking men. There are 
times, in the twilights of the day, and of the 
year, in the closing in of life, when we all 
contemplate death ; and the Elegy tells all 
our thoughts in lines that possess our memo- 
ries like our mothers' voices. It shows sim- 
ple folk in sight of death, calm, natural, seri- 
ous, high-minded. Thomas a Kempis, Cato 
the younger, the cavaliers of the Light Bri- 



42 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

gade, may have thought upon death after 
other fashions, but for most of us the 
thoughts of our hearts have been portrayed 
by Gray. 

" Tom Jones " is the contemplation of life 
in ordinary Englishmen. In the innocent days 
before Mr. Hardy and some other writers of 
distinction " Tom Jones " was reputed coarse, 
— one of those classics that should find their 
places on a shelf well out of reach of young 
arms. The manners of Squire Western and 
of Tom himself are such as often are best 
described in the Squire's own language. But 
who is the man, as Thackeray says, that does 
not feel freer after he has read the book? 
Fielding, in his rough and ready way, has 
described men as they are, made of the dust 
of the earth, and that not carefully chosen. 
We no longer read it aloud to our families, 
as was the custom of our great-grandfathers ; 
but we do not all read Mr. Hardy aloud to 
our daughters. " Tom Jones " is a big, strong, 
fearless, honest book ; it gives us a hearty 
slap on the back, congratulating us that we 
are alive, and we accept the congratulation 
with pleasure. Its richness is astonishing. 
It has flowed down through English litera- 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 43 

ture like a fertilizing Nile. In it we find 
the beginnings of Sheridan, Dickens, Thack- 
eray, George Eliot. In it we have those 
wonderful conversations between Square and 
Thwackum, which remind us of Don Quixote 
and Sancho Panza. Mrs. Seagrim talks for 
half a page, and we hold our noses against 
the smells in her kitchen. 

The power of the book is its eulogy upon 
life. Is it not wretched to be stocks, stones, 
tenants of Westminster Abbey, mathemati- 
cians, or young gentlemen lost in philoso- 
phy ? Is not the exhilaration of wine good ? 
Is not dinner worth the eating ? Do not 
young women make a most potent and 
charming government ? Fielding takes im- 
mense pleasure in the foolishness, in the foi- 
bles of men, and he finds amusement in their 
vices, but over virtue and vice, over wisdom 
and folly, he always insists upon the joy and 
the value of life. 

When we shall have re-read " Tom Jones " 
and repeated Gray's Elegy to ourselves, then 
we shall be in the mood in which we can 
best determine the value of foreign novels 
for us. And so, with this avowal of our 
point of view, we approach the stories of the 



44 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

distinguished Italian novelist, Gabriele d'An- 
nunzio. 

Men of action who apply themselves to 
literature are likely to have a generous con- 
fidence that skill will follow courage; that if 
they write, the capacity to write effectively 
will surely come. Plays, novels, editorials, 
sonnets, are written by them straight upon 
the impulse. They plunge into literature as 
if it were as buoyant as their spirit, and 
strike out like young sea creatures. Gabri- 
ele d'Annunzio is a man of another complex- 
ion. He is not a man of action, but of re- 
flection. He is a student; he lives in the 
world of books. Through this many-colored 
medium of literature he sees men and wo- 
men ; but he is saved from an obvious ar- 
tificiality by his sensitiveness to books of 
many kinds. He has submitted to laborious 
discipline; he has sat at the feet of many 
masters. His early schooling may be seen in 
a collection of stories published in 1886 un- 
der the name of the first, " San Pantaleone." 
One story is in imitation of Verga, another 
of de Maupassant ; and in " La Fattura " is 
an attempt to bring the humor of Boccaccio 
into a modern tale. Even in the u Decam- 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 45 

eron " this renowned humor has neither affec- 
tion nor pity for father ; in its own cradle it 
mewls like an ill-mannered foundling. In 
the hands of d'Annunzio it acquires the in- 
genuous charm of Mr. Noah Claypole. We 
believe that d'Annunzio, consciously or un- 
consciously, became aware of his native an- 
tipathy to humor, for we have not found 
any other attempt at it in his work. It is 
in this absence of humor that we first feel 
the separation between d'Annunzio and the 
deep human feelings. In Italian literature 
there is no joyous, mellow, merry book, in 
which as a boy he might have nuzzled and 
rubbed off upon himself some fruitful pollen. 
One would as soon expect to find a portrait 
of Mr. Pickwick by Botticelli as the spirit of 
Dickens in any cranny of Italian literature. 
M. de Vogue has said that d'Annunzio is 
born out of time ; that in spirit he is one of 
the cinqnecentisti. There is something fero- 
cious and bitter in him. The great human 
law of gravitation, that draws man to man, 
does not affect him. 

Nevertheless, these stories have much vigor 
and skillful description. In " San Pantale- 
one " d'Annunzio depicts the frenzy and fierce 



46 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

emotions of superstition in southern Italy. 
Savage fanaticism interests him. The com- 
bination of high imagination and the exalta- 
tion of delirium with the stupidity and igno- 
rance of beasts has a powerful attraction for 
him. The union of the intellectual and the 
bestial is to him the most remarkable phe- 
nomenon of life. 

This early book is interesting also in that 
it shows ideas in the germ and in their first 
growth which are subsequently developed in 
the novels, and in that it betrays d'Annun- 
zio's notion that impersonality — that deliv- 
erance from the frailty of humanity to which 
he would aspire — is an escape from compas- 
sion and affection, and is most readily come 
at through contempt. 

D'Annunzio has spared no pains to make 
his language as melodious and efficient an 
instrument as he can. Italian prose has 
never been in the same rank with Italian 
poetry. There have been no great Italians 
whose genius has forced Italian prose to bear 
the stamp and impress of their personalities. 
In the sixteenth century this prose was clear 
and capable, but since then it has gradually 
shrunk to fit the thoughts of lesser men. 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 47 

D'Annunzio has taken on his back the task 
of liberating the Italian tongue ; he will give 
it " virtue, manners, freedom, power." Not 
having within him the necessity of utterance, 
not hurried on by impetuous talents, he has 
applied himself to his task with deliberation 
and circumspection. He has studied Boc- 
caccio and Petrarch and many men of old, 
so that his vocabulary shall be full, and his 
grammar as pure and flexible as the genius 
of the language will permit. He purposes 
to fetch from their hiding-places Italian 
words long unused, that he shall be at no 
loss for means to make plain the most deli- 
cate distinctions of meaning. He intends 
that his thoughts, which shall be gathered 
from all intellectual Europe, shall have fit 
words to house them. 

At the time of his first novels, d'Annun- 
zio turned to Paris, the capital of the Latin 
world, as to his natural school. In Paris 
men of letters (let us except a number of 
gallant young gentlemen disdainful of read- 
ers) begin by copying and imitation, that 
they may acquire the mechanical parts of 
their craft. They study Stendhal, Flaubert, 
de Maupassant ; they contemplate a chapter, 



48 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

they brood over a soliloquy, they grow lean 
over a dialogue. They learn how the master 
marshals his ideas, how he winds up to his 
climax, what tricks and devices he employs 
to take his reader prisoner. From time to 
time voices protestant are raised, crying out 
against the sacrifice of innocent originality. 
But the band of the lettered marches on. 
Why should they forego knowledge gathered 
together with great pains? Shall a young 
man turn against the dictionary? 

In Paris d'Annunzio found a number of 
well-established methods for writing a novel. 
Some of these methods have had a power- 
ful influence upon him ; therefore it may be 
worth while to remind ourselves of them, in 
order that we may the better judge his capa- 
city for original work and for faithful imita- 
tion. 

The first method is simply that of the old- 
fashioned novel of character and manners, 
and needs no description. 

The second method, the familiar philo-real 
or philo-natural, hardly may be said to be a 
method for writing a novel ; it is a mode of 
writing what you will ; but it has achieved 
its reputation in the hands of novelists. This 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 49 

method is supposed to require careful, pains- 
taking, and accurate observation of real per- 
sons, places, and incidents ; but in truth it 
lets this duty sit very lightly on its shoul- 
ders, and commonly consists in descriptions, 
minute, elaborate, prolix. It pretends to be 
an apotheosis of fact ; it is a verbal ritual. 
It has been used by many a man uncon- 
scious of schools. In practice it is the most 
efficacious means of causing the illusion of 
reality within the reach of common men. 
By half a dozen pages of deliberate and ex- 
act enumeration of outward parts, a man 
may frequently produce as vivid and memory- 
haunting a picture as a poet does with a met- 
aphor or an epithet. M. Zola, by virtue of 
his vigor, his zeal, and his fecundity, has won 
popular renown as leader of this school. 

The third method is the psychological. 
It consists in the delineation in detail of 
thoughts and feelings instead of actions, the 
inward and unseen in place of the outward 
and visible. The novelist professes an inti- 
mate knowledge of the wheels, cogs, cranks 
of the brain, and of the airy portraiture of 
the mind, and he describes them with an 
embellishment of scientific phrase, letting the 



50 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

outward acts take care of themselves as best 
they may. The danger of this method is 
lest the portrayal of psychic states constitute 
the novel, and lest the plot and the poor 
little incidents squeeze in with much dis- 
comfort. Perhaps M. Bourget is the most 
distinguished member of this school. 

The fourth mode is that of the Symbolistes. 
These writers are not wholly purged from 
all desire for self-assertion ; they wish room 
wherein openly to display themselves, and to 
this end they have withdrawn apart out of 
the shadow of famous names. They assert 
that they stand for freedom from old saws ; 
that the philosophic doctrine of idealism up- 
sets all theories based upon the reality of 
matter ; that the business of art is to use the 
imperfect means of expression at its com- 
mand to suggest and indicate ideas; that 
character, action, incidents, are but symbols 
of ideas. They hold individuality sacred, 
and define it to be that which man has in 
himself unshared by any other, and deny the 
name to all that he has in common with 
other men. Therefore this individuality, 
being but a small part, a paring, as it were, 
of an individual, shows maimed and unnat- 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 61 

ural. And thus they run foul of seeming 
opposites, both the individual and also the 
abstract ; for the revered symbol is neither 
more nor less than an essence abstracted 
from the motley company of individuals, fil- 
tered and refined, which returns decked out 
in the haberdashery of generalities, under 
the baptismal name of symbol. In order to 
facilitate this latter process of extracting and 
detaching unity from multiplicity, they mur- 
mur songs of mystic sensuality, as spiritual- 
ists burn tapers of frankincense at the dis- 
entanglement of a spirit from its fellows in 
the upper or nether world. One of the best 
known of these is Maurice Maeterlinck. 

There is, moreover, a doctrine that runs 
across these various methods, like one pat- 
tern across cloths of divers materials, which 
affects them all. It is that the writer shall 
persistently obtrude himself upon the reader. 
Stated in this blunt fashion, the doctrine is 
considered indecent ; it is not acknowledged ; 
and, in truth, these Frenchmen do not reveal 
their personality. It may indeed be doubted 
if they have any such encumbrance. In its 
place they have a bunch of theories tied up 
with the ribbon of their literary experience ; 



52 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

and the exhalations of it, as if it were a 
bunch of flowers, they suffer to transpire 
through their pages. These theories are not 
of the writer's own making; they are the 
notions made popular in Paris by a number 
of distinguished men, of whom the most 
notable are Taine and Renan. The inevi- 
table sequence of cause and effect and its 
attendant corollaries, vigorously asserted and 
reiterated by M. Taine, and the amiable irony 
of M. Renan, have had success with men of 
letters out of all proportion to their intel- 
lectual value. Their theories have influenced 
novels very much, and life very little. Why 
should the dogmas of determinism and of 
unskeptical skepticism affect men in a novel 
more obviously than they affect men in the 
street ? 

Into this world of Parisian letters, in 
among these literary methods, walked young 
d'Annunzio, sensitive, ambitious, detached 
from tradition, with his ten talents wrapped 
up in an embroidered and scented napkin, 
with his docile apprentice habit of mind, and 
straightway set himself, with passion for art 
and the ardor of youth, to the task of ac- 
quiring these French methods, that he should 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 53 

become the absolute master of his talents, 
and be able to put them out at the highest 
rate of usury. Young enough to be seduced 
by the blandishments of novelty, he passed 
over the old-fashioned way of describing 
character, and studied the methods of the 
realists, the psychologists, the symbolists. 
With his clear, cool head he very soon mas- 
tered their methods, and in the achievement 
quickened and strengthened his artistic capa- 
cities, his precision, his sense of proportion, 
his understanding of form. But the nurture 
of his art magnified and strengthened his 
lack of humanity. Lack of human sympathy 
is a common characteristic of young men 
who are rich in enthusiasm for the written 
word, the delineated line, the carving upon 
the cornice. Devotion to the minute refine- 
ments of art seems to leave no room in their 
hearts for human kindliness. The unripe- 
ness of youth, overwork, disgust with the 
common in human beings, help to separate 
them from their kind. In their weariness 
they forget that the great masters of art are 
passionately human. D'Annunzio does not 
wholly admit that he is a human unit, and 
his sentiment in this matter has made him 



54 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

all the more susceptible to literary influences. 
We find in him deep impressions from his 
French studies. He has levied tribute upon 
Zola, Bourget, and Loti. 

In 1889 d'Annunzio published " II Pia- 
cere." He lacks, as we have said, strong 
human feelings ; he does not know the inter- 
est in life as life ; he has no zeal to live, and 
from the scantiness and barrenness of his 
external world he turns to the inner world of 
self. M. de Vogue has pointed out that his 
heroes, Sperelli, Tullio Hermil, and Georgio 
Aurispa, are all studies of himself. D'An- 
nunzio does not deny this. He would argue 
that it would be nonsense to portray others, 
as we know ourselves best. Sperelli, the 
hero of " II Piacere," is an exact portrait of 
himself. He is described as "the perfect 
type of a young Italian gentleman in the 
nineteenth century, the true representative 
of a stock of gentlemen and dainty artists, 
the last descendant of an intellectual race. 
He is saturated with art. His wonderful 
boyhood has been nourished upon divers 
profound studies. From his father he ac- 
quired a taste for artistic things, a passionate 
worship of beauty, a paradoxical disdain for 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 55 

prejudice, avidity for pleasure. His educa- 
tion was a living thing ; it was not got out 
of books, but in the glare of human reality." 
The result was that " Sperelli chose, in the 
practice of the arts, those instruments that 
are difficult, exact, perfect, that cannot be 
put to base uses, — versification and engrav- 
ing ; and he purposed strictly to follow and 
to renew the forms of Italian tradition, bind- 
ing himself with fresh ties to the poets of the 
new style and to the painters who came be- 
fore the Renaissance. His spirit was formal 
in its very essence. He valued expression 
more than thought. His literary essays were 
feats of dexterity ; studies devoted to re- 
search, technique, the curious. He believed 
with Taine that it would be more difficult 
to write six beautiful lines of poetry than to 
win a battle. His story of an hermaphrodite 
was imitative, in its structure, of the story 
of ' Orpheus ' by Poliziano ; it had verses of 
exquisite delicacy, melody, and force, espe- 
cially in the choruses sung by monsters of 
double form, — centaurs, sirens, sphinxes. 
His tragedy ' La Simona,' composed in lyri- 
cal metre, was of a most curious savor. Al- 
though its rhymes obeyed the old Tuscan 



56 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

models, it seemed as if it had been begot- 
ten in the fancy of an Elizabethan poet by a 
story from the l Decameron ; ' it held some- 
thing of that music, rich and strange, which 
is in some of Shakespeare's minor plays." 

" II Piacere " is a study of the passion of 
love. Sperelli's love for Elena, and after- 
wards for Maria, is made the subject of an 
essay in the guise of a novel upon two 
aspects of this passion. The first is the 
union of mind, almost non-human, unac- 
quainted with lif e as if new-born, with the fact 
of sex. D'Annunzio takes this fact of sex 
in its simplest form, and portrays its effects 
upon the mind in the latter's most sequestered 
state, separate and apart, uninfluenced by 
human things, divorced from all humanity. 
He observes the isolated mind under the 
dominion of this fact, and describes it in like 
manner as he depicts the sea blown upon by 
the wind. The shifting push of emotion, the 
coming and going of thought, the involu- 
tions and intricacy of momentary feeling, 
the whirl of fantastic dreams, the swoop and 
dash of memory, the grasp at the absolute, 
the rocket-like whir of the imagination, — 
all the motions of the mind, like the sur- 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 57 

face of a stormy sea, toss and froth before 
you. 

Sperelli's love for Maria, at least in the 
beginning, is as lovely as a girl could wish. 
It may be too much akin to his passion for 
art, it may have in it too much of the ichor 
that flowed in Shelley's veins. It is delicate, 
ethereal; it is the passion of a dream man 
for a dream maiden. It feeds on beauty ; 
yet " like a worm i' the bud." " But long 
it could not be, till that " his baser nature 
" pull'd the poor wretch from its melodious 
lay to muddy death." Yet the book is full 
of poetry. We hardly remember chapters 
in any novel that can match in charm those 
that succeed the narrative of the duel. We 
must free ourselves from habit by an effort, 
and put out of our simple bourgeois minds 
the fact that Maria has made marriage vows 
to another man ; and we are able to do this, 
for the husband has no claims upon her ex- 
cept from those vows, and the poetry of the 
episode ends long before those vows are 
broken. 

This novel, like the others, is decorated, 
enameled, and lacquered with cultivation. 
They are all like Christmas trees laden with 



58 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

alien fruit, — tinsel, candles, confectionery, 
anything that will catch the eye. England, 
France, Germany, Russia, contribute. Paint- 
ing, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, 
are called upon to give color, form, structure, 
sound, and dreaminess to embellish the de- 
scriptions. The twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, 
fifteenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centu- 
ries parade before us in long pageant, — 
" L'uno e l'altro Guido," Gallucci, Memling, 
Bernini, Pollajuolo, Pinturicchio, Storace, 
Watteau, Shelley, Rameau, Bach, Gabriel 
Rossetti, Bizet. The charm of a woman for 
him is that she resembles a Madonna by 
Ghirlandajo, an intaglio by Niccolo Niccoli, 
a quatrain by Cino. His ladies are tattooed 
with resemblances, suggestions, proportions, 
similarities. The descriptions of their attrac- 
tions read like an index to " The Stones of 
Venice." He does not disdain to translate 
Shelley's verse into Italian prose without 
quotation marks. This passion for art is 
d'Annunzio's means of escaping the vulgarity 
of common men ; it is his refuge, his cleft 
in the rock, whither he may betake himself, 
and in which he may enjoy the pleasures of 
intellectual content and scorn. This taste 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 59 

emphasizes his lack of human kindliness, and 
it heightens the effect of unreality ; moreover 
it limits and clips off the interest of the com- 
mon reader. D'Annunzio is like Mr. Pater 
in his nice tastes. He has noticed that the 
sentences of men who write from a desire 
to go hand in hand with other men, from 
an eagerness to propagate their own beliefs, 
trudge and plod, swinging their clauses and 
parentheses like loosely strapped panniers; 
that they observe regulations that should be 
broken, and break rules that should be kept. 
Therefore he girds himself like a gymnast, 
and with dainty mincing periods glides har- 
monious down the page ; but his grace 
sometimes sinks into foppishness. He would 
defend himself like Lord Foppington in the 
play. 

" Tom. Brother, you are the prince of 
coxcombs. 

" Lord Foppington. I am praud to be 
at the head of so prevailing a party." 

But even d'Annunzio's great skill cannot 
rescue him from obvious artificiality. He 
lives in a hothouse atmosphere of abnormal 
refinement, at a temperature where only crea- 
tures nurtured to a particular degree and a 



60 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

half Fahrenheit can survive. Sometimes one 
is tempted to believe that d'Annunzio, con- 
scious of his own inhumanity, deals with the 
passions in the vain hope to lay hand upon 
the human. He hovers like a non-human 
creature about humanity, he is eager to 
know it, he longs to become a man ; and 
Setebos, his god, at his supplication turns 
him into a new form. The changeling thinks 
he is become a man ; but lo ! he is only an 
intellectual beast. 

Our judgment of d' Annunzio's work, how- 
ever, is based upon other considerations than 
that of the appropriate subordination of his 
cultivation to his story. It depends upon our 
theory of human conduct and our philosophy 
of lif e, upon our answers to these questions : 
Has the long, long struggle to obtain new 
interests — interests that seem higher and 
nobler than the old, interests the record of 
which constitutes the history of civilization 
— been mere unsuccessful folly? Are the 
chief interests in life the primary instincts ? 
Are we no richer than the animals, after all 
these toiling years of renunciation and self- 
denial ? Is the heritage which we share with 
the beasts the best that our fathers have 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 61 

handed down to us ? There seem to be in 
some corners of our world persons who an- 
swer these questions in the affirmative, say- 
ing, " Let us drop hypocrisy, let us face facts 
and know ourselves, let English literature put 
off false traditions and deal with the realities 
of life," and much more, all sparkling with 
brave words. Persons like Mr. George Moore, 
who have a profound respect for adjectives, 
say these instincts are primary, they are fun- 
damental, and think that these two words, 
like " open sesame," have admitted us into the 
cave of reality. We are unable to succumb 
to the hallucination. The circulation of the 
blood is eminently primary and fundamen- 
tal, yet there was literature of good repute 
before it was dreamed of. For ourselves, 
we find the interests of life in the secondary 
instincts, in the thoughts, hopes, sentiments, 
which man has won through centuries of 
toil, — here a little, there a little. We find 
the earlier instincts interesting only as they 
furnish a struggle for qualities later born. 
We are bored and disgusted by dragons of 
the prime until we hear the hoofs of St. 
George's horse and see St. George's helmet 
glitter in the sun. The dragon is no more 



62 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

interesting than a cockroach, except to prove 
the prowess of the hero. The bucking horse 
may kick and curvet; we care not, till the 
cowboy mount him. These poor primary 
instincts are mere bulls for the toreador, 
wild boars for the chase ; they are our mea- 
sures for strength, self-denial, fortitude, cour- 
age, temperance, chastity. The instinct of 
self-preservation is the ladder up which the 
soldier, the fireman, the lighthouse-keeper, 
lightly trip to fame. What is the primary 
and fundamental fear of death ? With whom 
is it the most powerful emotion? " my 
son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom ! 
would God I had died for thee ! " Is it with 
mothers ? Ask them. 

D'Annunzio, with his predilections for aris- 
tocracy, thinks that these primary instincts 
are of unequaled importance and interest 
because of their long descent. He forgets 
that during the last few thousand years 
power has been changing hands ; that de- 
mocracy has come upon us ; and that a vir- 
tue is judged by its value to-day, and not by 
that which it had in the misty past. Litera- 
ture is one long story of the vain struggles 
of the primary instincts against the moral 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 63 

nature of man. From " (Edipus Tyrannus " 
to " The Scarlet Letter " the primary passions 
are defeated and overcome by duty, religion, 
and the moral law. The misery of broken law 
outlives passion and tramples on its embers. 
The love of Paolo and Francesca is swallowed 
up in their sin. It is the like in Faust. 
Earthly passion cannot avail against the 
moral powers. This network of the imagi- 
nation binds a man more strongly than iron 
shackles. The relations of our souls, of our 
higher selves, to these instincts, are what 
absorb us. We are thrilled by the stories in 
which moral laws, children of instinct, have 
arisen and vanquished their fathers, as the 
beautiful young gods overcame the Titans. 
If duty loses its savor, life no longer is 
salted. The primary passions may continue 
to hurl beasts at one another ; human interest 
is gone. Were it not for conscience, honor, 
loyalty, the primary instincts would never be 
the subject of a story. They would stay in 
the paddocks of physiological textbooks. 

" What a piece of work is man " that he 
has been able to cover a fact of animal life 
with poetry more beautifully than Shake- 
speare dresses a tale from Bandello ! He 



64 

has created his honor as wonderful as his 
love ; soldiers, like so many poets, have 
digged out of cruelty and slaughter this 
jewel of life. Where is the instinct of self- 
preservation here? At Koncesvaux, when 
Charlemagne's rear-guard is attacked by over- 
whelming numbers, Koland denies Oliver's 
request that he blow his horn for help. His 
one thought is that poets shall not sing songs 
to his dishonor : — 

" Male cangun n'en deit estre cante*e." 

And is the belief in chastity, which has 
run round the world from east to west,, no- 
thing but a superstition born of fear ? Has 
it lasted so long only to be proved at the 
end a coward and a dupe ? Is this sacrifice 
of self mere instinctive folly in the individ- 
ual ? Does he gain nothing by it ? Are 
the worship of the Virgin Mary, the praise 
of Galahad, the joys of self-denial, no more 
than monkish ignorance and timidity ? 

We are of the opinion that Vart de la 
j)ourriture is popular because it is easily 
acquired. It deals with the crude, the sim- 
ple, the undeveloped. It has little to do 
with the complicated, intertwined mass of re- 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 65 

lations that binds the individual to all other 
individuals whether he will or not. It does 
not try to unravel the conglomerate sum of 
human ties. It does not see the myriad in- 
fluences that rain down upon a man from all 
that was before him, from all that is contem- 
poraneous with him ; it does not know the 
height above him, the depth beneath, the 
mysteries of substance and of void. It deals 
with materials that offer no resistance, no 
difficulty, and cannot take the noble and 
enduring forms of persisting things. It 
ignores the great labors of the human mind, 
and the transforming effect of them upon its 
human habitation. This art cannot give 
immortality. One by one the artists who 
produce it drop off the tree of living litera- 
ture and are forgotten. The supreme passion 
of love has been told by Dante : — 

" Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante." 

Does d'Annunzio think that he would have 
bettered the passage? In the great delin- 
eation of passion, vulgarity and indecency, 
insults to manners, the monotony of vice, 
are obliterated ; the brutality of detail slinks 
off in silence. 



66 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

In 1892 d'Annunzio published " L'lnno- 
cente." In this novel, as M. de Vogue has 
pointed out, he has directed his powers of 
imitation towards the great Russian novelists. 
But his spirit and talents are of such differ- 
ent sort from those of Tourgenieff, Tolstoi, 
and Dostoiewsky that the copy is of the out- 
side and show. D' Annunzio's faculties have 
not been able to incorporate and to assimi- 
late anything of the real Slav ; they are the 
same, and express themselves in the same 
way, in " L'Innocente " as in " II Piacere." 
We therefore pass to his most celebrated 
novel, " II Trionfo della Morte," published in 
1894. A translation of it — that is, of as 
much of it as was meet for French readers 
— was soon after published in the " Revue 
des Deux Mondes." This novel won the 
approval of M. de Vogue, and has made Ga- 
briele d'Annunzio a famous name through- 
out Europe. 

The plot, if we may use an old-fashioned 
word to express new matter, is this : Georgio 
Aurispa, a young man of fortune, who leads 
a life of emptiness in Rome, one day meets 
Ippolita, the wife of another man. On this 
important day he has gone to hear Bach's 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST G7 

Passion Music in a private chapel, and there 
he sees the beautiful Ippolita. Bored and 
disgusted by coarse pleasures, he throws 
himself with rapture into a poetical passion 
for this pale-faced, charming, slender Roman 
woman. The story begins just before the 
second anniversary of their meeting in the 
chapel. The husband has absconded, and 
Ippolita lives with her family. No sugges- 
tion of a possible marriage is made, although 
Aurispa frequently meditates with anguish 
on the thought that she may forsake him. 
He is wholly given to examining his mind 
and feelings ; he follows their changes, he 
explains their causes, he anticipates their 
mutations. He picks up each sentiment deli- 
cately, like a man playing jackstraws, holds 
it suspended, contemplates it from this side 
and from that, balances it before the faceted 
mirror of his imagination, and then falls 
into a melancholy. He dandles his senti- 
ment for her, he purrs over it, he sings to it 
snatches of psychical old tunes, he ministers 
to it, fosters it, cherishes it, weeps over it, 
wonders if it be growing or decreasing. 

For some reasons of duty Ippolita is obliged 
to be away from Eome from time to time, 



68 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

once in Milan with her sister. Aurispa hears 
of her, that she is well, that she is gay. " She 
laughs ! Then she can laugh, away from 
me ; she can be gay ! All her letters are full 
of sorrow, of lamentation, of hopeless long- 
ing." The English reader is taken back to 
that scene in " The Rivals " where Bob 
Acres tells Faulkland that he has met Miss 
Melville in Devonshire, and that she is very 
well. 

" Acres. She has been the belle and spirit 
of the company wherever she has been, — so 
lively and entertaining ! So full of wit and 
humor ! 

"Faulkland. There, Jack, there. Oh, 
by my soul ! there is an innate levity in 
woman that nothing can overcome. What ! 
happy, and I away ! " 

Aurispa is peculiarly sensitive ; the bunches 
of nerve fibres at the base of his brain, the 
ganglia in his medulla oblongata, are ex- 
traordinarily alert, delicate, and powerful. 
Every sensation runs through them like a 
galloping horse ; memory echoes the beat- 
ing of its hoofs, and imagination speeds it 
on into the future, till it multiplies, expands, 
and swells into a troop. Aurispa yearns to 






D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 69 

lose himself in happiness, and then droops 
despondent, for a sudden jog of memory re- 
minds him that he was in more of an ecstasy 
when he first met Ippolita than he is to-day. 
" Where are those delicate sensations which 
once I had ? Where are those exquisite and 
manifold pricks of melancholy, those deep 
and twisted pains, wherein I lost my soul as 
in an endless labyrinth ? " 

In the zeal of his desire for fuller, more 
enduring pleasure, he takes Ippolita to a 
lonely house beside the sea that shall be 
their hermitage. 

Aurispa feels that there are two conditions 
necessary to perfect happiness : one that he 
should be the absolute master of Ippolita, 
the other that he should have unlimited in- 
dependence himself. " There is upon earth 
but one enduring intoxication : absolute cer- 
tainty in the ownership of another, — cer- 
tainty fixed and unshakable." Aurispa pro- 
poses to attain this condition. He puts his 
intelligence to slavish service in discovery 
of a method by which he shall win that 
larger life and perfect content of which al- 
most all men have had visions and dreams. 
Long ago Buddha sought and thought to 



70 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

attain this condition. Long ago the Stoics 
devised plans to loose themselves from the 
knots that tie men to the common life of all. 
Long ago the Christians meditated a philo- 
sophy that should free them from the bonds 
of the flesh, that they might live in the 
spirit. Heedless of their experience, Aurispa 
endeavors to find his content in sensuality ; 
but once in their hermitage, he soon perceives 
that the new life he sought is impossible. 
He feels his love for Ippolita dwindle and 
grow thin. He must physic it quickly or it 
will die ; and if love fail, nothing is left but 
death. Sometimes he thinks of her as dead. 
Once dead, she will become such stuff as 
thoughts are made of, a part of pure idealism. 
" Out from a halting and lame existence she 
will pass into a complete and perfect life, 
forsaking forever her frail and sinful body. 
To destroy in order to possess, — there is no 
other way for him who seeks the absolute in 
love." 

That was for Aurispa a continuing thought, 
but first his fancy turned for help to the re- 
ligious sensuousness of his race. " He had 
the gift of contemplation, interest in symbol 
and in allegory, the power of abstraction, an 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 71 

extreme sensitiveness to suggestions by sight 
or by word, an organic tendency to haunting 
visions and to hallucinations." He lacked 
but faith. At that time, superstition like a 
wind swept over the southern part o£ Italy ; 
there were rumors of a new Messiah ; an 
emotional fever infected the whole country 
round. A day's journey from the hermitage 
lay the sanctuary of Casalbordino. Once the 
Virgin had appeared there to a devout old 
man, and had granted his prayer, and to 
commemorate this miracle the sanctuary had 
been built ; and now the country-folk swarmed 
to the holy place. Georgio and Ippolita go 
thither. All the description of this place, as 
a note tells us, is the result of patient obser- 
vation. About the sanctuary are gathered 
together men and women from far and near, 
all in a state of high exaltation. Troop upon 
troop singing, — 

" Viva Maria ! 
Maria Evviva ! " 

trudge over the dusty roads. These people 
d'Annunzio depicts with the quick eye and 
the patient care of an Agassiz. Monstrous 
heads, deformed chests, shrunken legs, club- 
feet, distorted hands, swollen tumors, sores 



72 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

of many colors, all loathsome diseases to 
which flesh is heir and for which d'Annun- 
zio's medical dictionary has names, are here 
set forth. " How much morbid pathology 
has done for the novelist ! " he is reported to 
have said. Certainly its value to d'Annun- 
zio cannot be rated too high. Aurispa and 
Ippolita, excited by the fanatic exaltation, 
fight their way into the church. There a 
miserable mass of huddled humanity, shriek- 
ing for grace, struggles toward the altar rail. 
Behind the rail, the fat, stolid-faced priests 
gather up the offerings. The air is filled 
with nauseous smells. The church is a hide- 
ous charnel-house, roofing in physical disease 
and mental deformity. Outside, mountebanks, 
jugglers, gamesters, foul men and women, 
intercept what part of the offerings they can. 
The memory of this day made Aurispa and 
Ippolita sick, — her for human pity, him for 
himself ; for he became conscious that there 
is no power which can enthrall absolute plea- 
sure. He had turned toward heaven to save 
his life, and he has proved by experience his 
belief in the emptiness of its grace. 

With instinctive repulsion from death, he 
looks for escape to thought. Thought which 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 73 

litis enslaved him may set him free. He 
ponders upon the teaching of Nietzsche. 
Away with the creeds of weakness, the evan- 
gel of impotence ! Assert the justice of in- 
justice, the righteousness of power, the joy of 
creation and of destruction ! But Aurispa 
cannot. Nothing is left him but death. He* 
abandons all wish for perfect union with 
Ippolita, yet jealousy will not suffer him to 
leave her alive. His love for her has turned 
into hate. In his thoughts it is she that 
hounds him to death like a personal demon. 
He grows supersensitive. He cannot bear 
the red color of underdone beef. He is 
ready to die of a joint, in juicy pain. He 
gathers together in a heap and gloats over 
all that he finds disagreeable and repellent 
in Ippolita. What was she but his creation ? 
" Now, as always, she has done nothing but 
submit to the form and impressions that I 
have made. Her inner life has always been 
a fiction. When the influence of my sug- 
gestion is interrupted, she returns to her 
own nature, she becomes a woman again, the 
instrument of base passion. Nothing can 
change her, nothing can purify her." And 
at last, by treachery and force, he drags her 



74 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

with him over a precipice to death be- 
neath. 

Such is the plot, but there is no pretense 
that the plot is interesting or important except 
as a scaffold on which to exhibit a philosophy 
of life. That philosophy is clearly the au- 
thor's philosophy. D'Annunzio's novel shows 
in clear view and distinct outline how the 
whirligig of time brings about its revenges. 

Bishop Berkeley made famous the simple 
theory of idealism, — that a man cannot go 
outside of the inclosure of his mind ; that the 
material world is the handiwork of fancy, 
with no reality, no length, nor breadth, nor 
fixedness ; that the pageant of life is the 
march of dreams. Berkeley expected this 
theory to destroy materialism, skepticism, and 
infidelity. It did, in argument. Many a 
man has taken courage in this unanswerable 
retort to the materialist. He slings this 
theory, like a smooth pebble from the brook, 
at the Goliaths who advance with the pon- 
derous weapons of scientific discovery. 

The common idealist keeps his philosophy 
for his library, and walks abroad like his 
neighbors, subject to the rules, beliefs, and 
habits of common sense. But d'Annunzio, 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST UB 

who has received and adopted a bastard scion 
of this idealism, is, as befits a man of leisure 
and of letters, more faithful to his philosophy. 
He has set forth his version of the theory in 
this novel with characteristic clearness. Au- 
rispa looks on the world as an instrument 
that shall serve his pleasure. He will play 
upon it what tunes he can that he may enjoy 
the emotions and passions of life. He is 
separate from his family and has a private 
fortune. His world is small and dependent 
upon him. In this world Aurispa has no 
rival ; in it there is no male thing to bid him 
struggle for supremacy ; it is his private pro- 
perty, and the right of private property is 
fixed as firm beyond the reach of question as 
the fact of personal existence. Gradually a 
transformation takes place ; this well-ordered 
and obedient world changes under the domin- 
ion of Aurispa' s thought. Little by little 
object and subject lose their identity ; like 
the thieves of the Seventh Bolge in the In- 
ferno, they combine, unite, form but one 
whole. In this change the material world is 
swallowed up, and out from the transforma- 
tion crawls the ideal world of Aurispa's 
thought : — 



76 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

" Ogni primaio aspetto ivi era casso ; 
Due e nessun 1' imagine perversa 
Parea, e tal sen gia con lento passo." 

This ideal world is Aurispa's. It varies with 
his volition, for it is the aggregate of his 
thoughts, and they are the emanations of his 
will. In this dominion he stands like a de- 
generate Caesar, drunk with power, frenzied 
with his own potent impotence. Everything 
is under his control, and yet there is a some- 
thing imperceptible, like an invisible wall, 
that bars his way to perfect pleasure. He 
wanders all along it, touching, feeling, grop- 
ing, all in vain. Think subtly as he will, he 
finds no breach. Yet his deepest, his only 
desire is to pass beyond. Perhaps life is this 
barrier. He will break it down, and find his 
absolute pleasure in death. And in exasper- 
ation of despair before this invisible obstacle 
he has recourse to action. In the presence 
of action his ideal world wrestles once more 
with reality, and amid the struggles Aurispa 
finds that the only remedy for his impotent 
individuality is to die. Both idealism and 
fact push him towards death. 

If we choose to regard Aurispa as living 
in a real world, as a man responsible for his 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 77 

acts, as a member of human society, we have 
little to say concerning him. He is a timid 
prig, a voluptuous murderer, an intellectual 
fop, smeared with self-love, vulgar to the ut- 
most refinement of vulgarity, cruel, morbid, 
a flatterer, and a liar. 

For poor Ippolita we have compassion. 
Had she lived out of Aurispa's world, with 
her alluring Italian nature she might have 
been charming. There is a rare feminine 
attractiveness about her : had she been sub- 
ject to sweet influences, had she been born 
to Tourgenieff, she would have been one of 
the delightful women of fiction. All that 
she does has an attendant possibility of grace, 
eager to become incorporate in action. Del- 
icacy, sensitiveness, affection, fitness for the 
gravity and the gayety of life, hover like 
ministering spirits just beyond the covers of 
the book ; they would come down to her, but 
they cannot. This possibility died before its 
birth. Ippolita's unborn soul, like the ro- 
mantic episode in " II Piacere," makes us feel 
that d'Annunzio may hereafter break loose 
from his theories, free himself from his cigar- 
ette-smoking philosophy, smash the looking- 
glass in front of which he sits copying his 



78 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

own likeness, and start anew, able to under- 
stand the pleasures of life and prepared to 
share in the joys of the struggle. Surely M. 
de Vogue is looking at these indications of 
creative ability and poetic thought, and not 
at accomplishment, when he hails d' Annunzio 
as the leader of another Italian KeDaissance. 
It is hope that calls forth M. de Vogue's 
praise. A national literature has never yet 
been built upon imitation, sensuality, and 
artistic frippery. 

After finishing the last page of " The Tri- 
umph of Death," quick as a flash we pass 
through many phases of emotion. In the in- 
stant of time before the book leaves our hand, 
our teeth set, our muscles contract, we desire 
to hit out from the shoulder. Our memory 
teems with long-forgotten physical acts, up- 
per-cuts, left-handers, swingers, knock-outs. 
By some mysterious process, words that our 
waking mind could not recall surge up in 
capital letters ; all the vocabulary of Shake- 
spearean insult rings in our ears, — base, 
proud, shallow, beggarly, silk-stocking knave, 
a glass - gazing finical rogue, a coward, a 
pander, a cullionly barber-monger, a smooth- 
tongued bolting-hutch of beastliness. Our 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 79 

thoughts bound like wild things from prize- 
fights to inquisitors, from them to Iroquois, 
to devils. Then succeeds the feeling as of 
stepping on a snake, a sentiment as of a 
struggle between species of animals, of in- 
stinctive combat for supremacy ; no sense of 
ultimate ends or motives, but the sudden 
knowledge that our gorge is rising and that 
we will not permit certain things. We raise 
no question of reason ; we put aside intelli- 
gence, and say, The time is come for life 
to choose between you and us. The book, 
after leaving our hand, strikes the opposite 
wall and flutters to the floor. We grow 
calmer ; we draw up an indictment ; we will 
try Aurispa-d'Annunzio before a jury of 
English-speaking men. Call the tale. Colo- 
nel Newcome ! Adam Bede ! Baillie Jarvie ! 
Tom Brown ! Sam Weller ! But nonsense ! 
these men are not eligible. Aurispa-d'An- 
nunzio must be tried by a jury of his peers. 
By this time we have recovered our compo- 
sure, and rejoice in the common things of 
life, — shaving-brushes, buttoned boots, cra- 
vats, counting-stools, vouchers, ledgers, news- 
papers. All the multitude of little things, 
forgiving our old discourtesy, heap coals of 



80 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

fire upon our heads with their glad proofs 
of reality. For a moment we can draw aside 
" the veil of familiarity " from common life 
and behold the poetry there ; we bless our 
simple affections and our daily bread. The 
dear kind solid earth stands faithful and 
familiar under our feet. How beautiful it 
is! 

" Die unbegreiflich hohen Werke 
Sind herrlich wie am ersten Tag." 

D'Annunzio's latest novel, " Le Vergini 
delle Rocce," was published in 1896. In it 
he appears as a symbolist, and by far the 
most accomplished of the school. The story 
is not of real people, but concerns the in- 
habitants of some spiritual world, as if cer- 
tain instantaneous ideas of men, divorced 
from the ideas of the instant before and of 
the instant after, and therefore of a weird, 
unnatural look, had been caught there and 
kept to inhabit it, and should thenceforward 
live after their own spiritual order, with no 
further relations to humanity. These fig- 
ures bear no doubtful resemblance to the 
men and women in the pictures of Dante 
Rossetti and of Burne-Jones. One might 
fancy that a solitary maid gazing into a 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 81 

beryl stone would see three such strangely 
beautiful virgins, Massimilla, Anatolia, Vio- 
lante, move their weary young limbs daintily 
in the crystal sphere. 

The landscape is the background of an 
English preraphaelite painter. Here d'An- 
nunzio's style is in its delicate perfection. 
It carries these three strange and beautiful 
ladies along, as the river that runs down to 
many - towered Camelot bore onward the 
shallop of the Lady of Shalott. It is trans- 
lucent ; everything mirrors in it with a deli- 
cate sensitiveness, as if it were the mind of 
some fairy asleep, in which nothing except 
what is lovely and harmonious could reflect, 
and as if the slightest discord, the least petty 
failure of grace, would wake the sleeper and 
end the images forever. D'Annunzio's sen- 
tences have the quality of an incantation. 
This is the work of a master apprentice. 
But there the mastery ends. A story so far 
removed from life, a fairy story, must have 
order and law of its own, must be true to it- 
self ; or else it must move in some fairy plane 
parallel to human life, and never pretermit 
its correspondence with humanity. 

Claudio, the teller of the story, is a scion 



82 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

of a noble Italian family, of which one Ales- 
sandro had been the most illustrious member. 
When the tale begins Claudio is riding over 
the Campagna, thinking aloud, as it were. 
His mind is full of speculation. What is 
become of Kome ? — Rome, the home of the 
dominant Latin race, born to rule and to 
bend other nations to its desires. What is 
the Pope ? What is the King ? Who, who 
will combine in himself the triune powers 
of passion, intellect, and poetry, and lift the 
Italian people back to the saddle of the 
world ? By severe self-discipline Claudio has 
conceived his own life as a whole, as mate- 
rial for art, and has succeeded to so high a 
degree that now he holds all his power of 
passion, intellect, and poetry like a drawn 
sword. He will embody in act the concept 
of his life. He reflects how the Nazarene 
failed, for he feared the world and know- 
ledge, and turned from them to ignorance 
and the desert ; how Bonaparte failed, for he 
had not the conception of fashioning his life 
as a great work of art ; and Claudio's mind 
turns to his own ancestor, the untimely killed 
Alessandro, and ponders that he did not live 
and die in vain, but that his spirit still exists, 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 83 

ready to burst forth in some child of his 
race. Claudio's duty is to marry a woman 
who shall bear a son, such that his passion, 
intellect, and poetry shall make him the re- 
deemer of the world, and restore Rome mis- 
tress of nations. As he rides he calls upon 
the poets to defend the beautiful from the 
attacks of the gross multitude, and upon the 
patricians to assume their rightful place as 
masters of the people, to pick up the fallen 
whip and frighten back into its sty the Great 
Beast that grunts in parliament and press. 

Filled with these images of his desire, 
Claudio goes back to his ancestral domain 
in southern Italy. An aged lord, at one 
time friend to the last Bourbons of Naples, 
dwells in a neighboring castle with his three 
virgin daughters. About this castle we find 
all the literary devices of Maeterlinck. " The 
splendor falls on castle walls," but it is a 
strange light, as of a moon that has over- 
powered the sun at noon. The genius of 
the castle is the insane mother, who wanders 
at will through its chambers, down the paths 
of its gardens, rustling in her ancient dress, 
with two gray attendants at her heels. She 
is hardly seen, but, like a principle of evil, 



84 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

throws a spell over all the place. In front 
of the palace the fountain splashes its waters 
in continuous jets into its basin with mur- 
murous sounds of mysterious horror. Two 
sons hover about, gazing in timid fascina- 
tion upon their mother, wondering when the 
inheritance of madness shall fall upon them. 
One is already doomed ; the other, with fear- 
ful consciousness, is on the verge of doom. 
The three daughters have each her separate 
virtue. Massimilla is a likeness of St. Clare, 
the companion of St. Francis of Assisi. She 
is the spirit of the love that waits and re- 
ceives. Her heart is a fruitful garden with 
an infinite capability for faith. Anatolia is 
the spirit of the love that gives. She has 
courage, strength, and vitality enough to 
comfort and support a host of the weak and 
timid. Violante is the tragical spirit of the 
power of beauty. The light of triumph and 
the beauty of tragedy hang over her like a 
veil. From among these three beautiful vir- 
gins Claudio must choose one to be the 
mother of him who, composed of passion, 
power, and poetry, shall redeem the dis- 
jointed world, straighten the crooked course 
of nature, and set the crown of the world 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 85 

again on the forehead of Rome. He chooses 
Anatolia, and here the book enters the realm 
of reality. Anatolia is a real woman ; she 
feels the duties of womanhood, her bonds to 
her father, her mother, and her brothers, 
and in a natural and womanly way she re- 
fuses to be Claudio's wife. There the book 
ends, with the promise of two more volumes. 
Anatolia is a living being in this strange 
world of fantasy, and though she is not true 
to the spirit of the story, she is one of the 
indications of d'Annunzio's power. 

The faults of the book are great. But 
all books are not meant for all persons. Who 
shall judge the merits of such a book ? The 
men who live in a world of action, or the men 
who live in a world half made of dreams ? 
Shakespeare has written " The Tempest " for 
both divisions, but other men must be con- 
tent to choose one or the other. This book 
is for the latter class. Yet even for them it 
has great faults. The mechanical contriv- 
ances, the solitary castle, the insane mother, 
the three virgins, the chorus of the fountain, 
the iteration of thought, the repetition of 
phrase, are all familiar to readers of Maeter- 
linck. The element of the heroic, the advo- 



86 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

cacy of a patrician order, the love of Rome, 
the adulation of intellectual power, are dis- 
cordant with the mysterious nature of the 
book. Claudio, full of monster thoughts, — 
of a timid Christ, of an ill-rounded Napo- 
leon, of the world's dominion restored to 
Rome, — sits down to flirt with Massimilla 
in the attitude of a young Baudelaire. The 
reader feels that he has been watching a 
preraphaelite opera bouffe. 

We cannot be without some curiosity as 
to what is d'Annunzio's attitude towards his 
own novels. In Bourget's " Le Disciple " 
we had a hero in very much the same tangle 
of psychological theory as is Aurispa. The 
disciple wandered far in his search for ex- 
perience, for new fields and novel combina- 
tions of sentiment. His world lost all moral- 
ity. There was neither right nor wrong in 
it, but it still remained a real world. In the 
preface, the only chapter in which, under 
the present conventionalities of novel-writ- 
ing, the writer is allowed to speak in his own 
voice, Bourget, with Puritan earnestness, 
warns the young men of France to beware of 
the dangers which he describes, to look for- 
ward to the terrible consequences in a world 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 87 

in which there is neither right nor wrong, 
to turn back while yet they may. It seems 
reasonable to look to the prefaces to learn 
what d'Annunzio's attitude towards his own 
books is, and we find no consciousness in 
them of right and wrong, of good and evil, 
such as troubled Bourget. All d'Annunzio's 
work is built upon a separation between hu- 
manity — beings knowing good and evil — 
and art. 

Nevertheless, d'Annunzio has a creed. He 
believes in the individual, that he shall take 
and keep what he can ; that this is no world 
in which to play at altruism and to encum- 
ber ourselves with hypocrisy. He believes 
that power and craft have rights better than 
those of weakness and simplicity; that a 
chosen race is entitled to all the advantages 
accruing from that choice ; that a patrician 
order is no more bound to consider the lower 
classes than men are bound to respect the 
rights of beasts. He proclaims this belief, 
and preaches to what he regards as the patri- 
cian order his mode of obtaining from life 
all that it has to give. Art is his watch- 
word, the art of life is his text. Know the 
beautiful ; enjoy all that is new and strange ; 



88 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

be not afraid of the bogies of moral law and 
of human tradition, — they are idols wrought 
by ignorant plebeians. 

He finds that the main hindrance to the 
adoption of this creed is an uneasy sense of 
relativity of life. Even the patrician order 
entertains a suspicion that life — the noblest 
material for art to work in — is not of the 
absolute grain and texture that d'Annunzio's 
theory presupposes. The individual life, 
wrought with greatest care, and fashioned 
into a shape of beauty after d'Annunzio's 
model, may seem to lose all its loveliness 
when it is complete and the artist lies on his 
deathbed. And therefore, in order to obtain 
disciples, d'Annunzio perceives that he must 
persuade his patricians to accept the phe- 
nomena of life, which the senses present, as 
final and absolute. The main support for 
the theory of the relativity of life is religion. 
In long procession religious creeds troop 
down through history, and on every banner 
is inscribed the belief in an Absolute behind 
the seeming. D'Annunzio must get rid of 
all these foolish beliefs. He would argue, 
" They are a train of superstition, ignorance, 
and fear. They have failed and they will 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 89 

fail because they dare not face truth. What 
is the religious conception of the Divine 
love for man, and of the love of man for 
God ? God's love is a superstitious infer- 
ence drawn from the love of man for God ; 
and man's love of God in its turn is but a 
blind deduction from man's love for woman. 
In the light of science man's love for woman 
shrinks to an instinct. This Divine love 
that looks so fair, that has made heroes and 
sustained mystics, is mere sentimental milli- 
nery spun out of a fact of animal life. This 
fact is the root of the doctrine of relativity. 
From it has sprung religion, idealism, mysti- 
cism. Examine this fact scientifically ; see 
what it is, and how far, how very far, it is 
from justifying the inferences drawn from 
love, and without doubt the whole intellect- 
ual order of patricians must accept my be- 
liefs." Another man might say : " Suppose 
it be so ; suppose this animal fact be the 
root from which Springs the blossoming tree 
of Divine love : this inherent power of 
growth dumfounds me more, makes me 
more uncertain of my apparent perceptions, 
than all the priestly explanations." 

In d'Annunzio's idolatry of force there is 



90 D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 

a queer lack of the masculine ; his voice is 
shrill and sounds soprano. In his morbid 
supersensitiveness, in his odd fantasy, there 
is a feminine strain ; and yet not wholly fem- 
inine. In his incongruous delineation of char- 
acter there is a mingling of hopes and fears, 
of thoughts and feelings, that are found 
separate and distinct in man and woman. 
In all his novels there is an unnatural atmos- 
phere, which is different from that in the 
books of the mere decadents. There is the 
presence of an intellectual and emotional 
condition that is neither masculine nor fem- 
inine, and yet partaking of both. There is 
an appeal to some elements in our nature 
of which theretofore we were unaware. As 
sometimes on a summer's day, swimming on 
the buoyant waters of the ocean, we fancy 
that once we were native there, so in reading 
this book we have a vague surmise beneath 
our consciousness that once there was a time 
when the sexes had not been differentiated, 
and that we are in ourselves partakers of 
the spiritual characteristics of each ; and yet 
the feeling is wholly disagreeable. We feel 
as if we had been in the secret museum 
at Naples, and we are almost ready to bathe 



D'ANNUNZIO, NOVELIST 91 

in hot lava that we shall no longer feel 
unclean. 

We do not believe that a novel of the first 
rank can be made out of the materials at 
d'Annunzio's command. Instead of humor 
he has scorn and sneer; in place of con- 
science he gives us swollen egotism ; for the 
deep affections he proffers lust. We are 
human, we want human beings, and he sets 
up fantastic puppets; we ask for a man, and 
under divers aliases he puts forth himself. 
We grow weary of caparisoned paragraph 
and bedizened sentence, of clever imitation 
and brilliant cultivation ; we demand some- 
thing to satisfy our needs of religion, edu- 
cation, feeling ; we want bread, and he gives 
us a gilded stone. There are great regions 
of reality and romance still to be discovered 
by bold adventurers, but Gabriele d'Annun- 
zio will not find them unless he be born 
again. 



MONTAIGNE 



MONTAIGNE 



There have been greater men in litera- 
ture than Montaigne, but none have been 
more successful. His reputation is immense ; 
he is in men's mouths next to Dante and 
Cervantes. We look at that intelligent, con- 
templative, unimpassioned face, with its tired 
eyes, and wonder that he should have achieved 
fame as immortal as that of the fierce Italian 
or the noble Spaniard. In the affairs of fame 
luck plays its part. Sometimes a man's gen- 
ius keeps step with his country and his time ; 
he gains power from sympathy, his muscles 
harden, his head clears, as he runs a winning 
race. Another man will fail in the enervat- 
ing atmosphere of recognition and applause ; 
he needs obstacles, the whip and spur of dif- 
ficulty. Montaigne was born under a lucky 
star. Had fate shown him all the kingdoms 
of the world and all time, and given him the 
choice when and where to live, he could not 
have chosen better. 



96 MONTAIGNE 

Montaigne's genius is French in every 
fibre ; he embodies better than any one 
other man the French character. In this 
world nationality counts for much, both at 
home and abroad. Frenchmen enjoy their 
own ; they relish French nature, its niceties, 
its strong personality. Sluggish in turning 
to foreign things, they are not prone to ac- 
quire tastes ; but whatever is native to them 
they cultivate, study, and appreciate with 
rare subtlety. They enjoy Montaigne as 
men enjoy a work of art, with the satisfac- 
tion of comprehension. 

In truth, all men like a strong national 
flavor in a book. Montaigne typifies what 
France has been to the world : he exhibits 
the characteristic marks of French intelli- 
gence ; he represents the French mind. Of 
course such representation is false in many 
measures. A nation is too big to have her 
character completely shown forth by one man. 
Look at the cathedrals of the Ile-de-France ; 
read the lives of Joan of Arc and St. Francis 
of Sales, of the Jesuits in Canada ; remember 
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and that it was, 
as M. de Vogue says, the mad caprice of 
France which raised Napoleon to his high 



MONTAIGNE 97 

estate ; and we realize how fanciful it is to 
make one man typify a nation. Neverthe- 
less, it is common talk that France takes 
ideas and makes them clear ; that she un- 
ravels the tangled threads of thought, elimi- 
nating disorder ; that she is romantic ; that 
she is not religious ; that she shrugs her 
shoulders at the vague passions of the soul ; 
that she is immensely intelligent; that she 
is fond of pleasure; and that her favorite 
diversion is to sit beside the great boulevard 
of human existence and make comments, 
fresh, frank, witty, wise. 

In these respects Montaigne is typical. 
He does not create new ideas, he is no ex- 
plorer ; he takes the notions of other men, 
holds them up to the light, turns them round 
and about, gazing at them. He is intellectu- 
ally honest ; he dislikes pretense. At bottom, 
too, he is romantic : witness his reverence for 
Socrates, his admiration of the Stoics, his 
desire for the citizenship of Rome. He has 
the French cast of mind that regards men, 
primarily, not as individuals, but rather as 
members of society. He has the sense of 
behavior. " All strangeness and peculiarity 
in our manners and ways of life are to be 



98 MONTAIGNE 

avoided as enemies to society. . . . Know- 
ledge of how to behave in company is a very 
useful knowledge. Like grace and beauty, 
it conciliates at the very beginning of ac- 
quaintance, and in consequence opens the 
door for us to learn by the example of others, 
and to set an example ourselves, if we have 
anything worth teaching." 

Montaigne is not religious, — certainly not 
after the fashion of a Bishop Brooks or a 
Father Hecker. He is a pagan rather than 
a Christian. He likes gayety, wit, agreeable 
society ; he is fond of conversation. He 
boards his subject like a sociable creature, 
he is a born talker, he talks away obscurity. 
He follows his subject as a young dog fol- 
lows a carriage, bounding off the road a 
hundred times to investigate the neighbor- 
hood. His loose-limbed mind is easy, light, 
yet serious. He pares away the rind of 
things, smelling the fruit joyously, not as if 
employed in a business of funereal looks, 
but in something human and cheerful. He 
has good taste. 

Montaigne had good luck not only in his 
country, but also in his generation. He 
lived at the time when the main current of 



MONTAIGNE 99 

Latin civilization shifted from Italy to France. 
In the beginning of the sixteenth century, 
Italy was the intellectual head of the Latin 
world, her thought and art were the mould- 
ing forces of modern civilization. When the 
seventeenth century opened, France had as- 
sumed the primacy. The great culmination 
of the Italian Renaissance came close to the 
time of Montaigne's birth; when he died, 
Italy was sinking into dependence in thought 
and servility in art, whereas France was 
emerging from her civil wars, under the rule 
of one of the greatest of Frenchmen, ready 
to become the dominant power, politically 
and intellectually, in Europe. Coming at 
this time, Montaigne was a pioneer. His 
was one of the formative minds which gave 
to French intelligence that temper which has 
enabled it to do so much for the world in the 
last three hundred years. He showed it a 
great model of dexterity, lightness, and ease. 
Not only did Montaigne help fashion the 
French intelligence in that important period, 
but he did much to give that intelligence a 
tool by which it could put its capacities to 
use. It is from Montaigne that French 
prose gets a buoyant lightness. He has 



100 MONTAIGNE 

been called one of the great French poets. 
Had it not been for Montaigne and his con- 
temporaries, the depressing influence of the 
seventeenth century would have hardened 
the language, taking out its grace, and mak- 
ing it a clever mechanical contrivance. His 
influence has been immense. It is said that 
an hundred years after his death his Essays 
were to be found on the bookshelves of 
every gentleman in France. French critics 
trace his influence on Pascal, La Bruyere, 
Eousseau, Montesquieu, Sainte-Beuve, and 
Kenan. To-day no one can read M. Anatole 
France or M. Jules Lemaitre without saying 
to himself, " This is fruit from the same rich 
stock." 

There are reasons besides these which 
have given Montaigne his great position in 
the world's literature. The first is his habit 
of mind. He is a considerer, an examiner, a 
skeptic. He prowls about the beliefs, the 
opinions and usages, of men, and, taking up 
a thought, lifts from it, one by one, the 
envelopes of custom, of prejudice, of time, 
of place. He holds up the opinion of one 
school, praising and admiring it ; and then 
the contradictory opinion of another school, 



MONTAIGNE 101 

praising and admiring that. In his scales he 
balances notion against notion, man against 
man, usage against usage. It was his great 
usefulness that, in a time when notable men 
put so much trust in matters of faith that 
they constructed theologies of adamant and 
burnt dissenters, he calmly announced the 
relativity of knowledge. He was no student 
mustily thinking in a dead language, but a 
gentleman in waiting to the king, knight of 
the Order of St. Michael, writing in fresh, 
poetic French, with all the captivation of 
charm, teaching the fundamental principles 
of doubt and uncertainty; for if there be 
doubt there will be tolerance, if there be un- 
certainty there will be liberality. He laid 
the axe to the root of religious bigotry and 
civil intolerance. " Things apart by them- 
selves have, it may be, their weight, their 
dimensions, their condition ; but within us, 
the mind cuts and fashions them according 
to its own comprehension. . . . Health, con- 
science, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty, 
and their contraries, strip off their outward 
semblances at the threshold of the mind, and 
receive at its hands new garments, of such 
dyes as it please." 



102 MONTAIGNE 

The emphasis of self is at the base of mod- 
ern life. The art of the Kenaissance sprung 
from the passion for self-expression. The 
Kef ormation took self as the hammer which 
broke the yoke of the Roman Church. Self 
stood on its feet and faced God ; what need 
of priests and intermediaries ? Montaigne is 
a great exponent of this spirit. A man of 
letters and a philosopher, he did not find in 
duty an explanation of life, but he realized 
the significance of this imperious self, this I, 
I, I, that proclaims itself to be at the bottom 
of everything. Step by step, as he goes from 
Plato to Cicero, from Cicero to Seneca, from 
Seneca to Plutarch, he discovers humanity 
taking individual form ; compressed into the 
likeness of a single man, it puts on familiar 
features, it speaks with a well-known voice, 
turns and shapes itself in the mould of a 
single human mind : that face, that voice, 
that mind, are his own. Start how he will, 
every road twists and winds back to himself. 
As if by compulsion he gradually renounces 
all other study. In self is to be found the 
philosophy of life. If we once firmly accept 
the notion that we know nothing but our- 
selves, then the universe outside becomes a 



MONTAIGNE 103 

shadowy collection of vapors, mysterious, hy- 
pothetical, and self hardens into the only 
reality. Here is a basis for a religion or a 
philosophy. So speculating, the philosopher 
opened the eyes of the artist. If self be the 
field of philosophy, it is the opportunity of 
the artist. Never had a man of letters sat 
to himself for his own portrait. Montaigne 
is the " prince of egotists," because he is a 
philosopher and a great artist. He is a skep- 
tic, but he points a way to positive doctrine. 
He is a man of letters, but he teaches the 
primary rules of civil and religious liberty. 
He is a member of the Holy Church, Apos- 
tolic and Roman, but he lays the foundation 
of a philosophy open to Reformer and to 
infidel. Profoundly interested in the ques- 
tions lying at the base of fife, he is one of 
the greatest artists of the Renaissance. 

II 

Montaigne was a Gascon, of a family of 
merchants. His great-grandfather, Ramon 
Eyquem, founded the family fortunes by 
trade, and bettered them by a prudent mar- 
riage. He became one of the richest mer- 
chants of Bordeaux, dealing in wine and salt 



104 MONTAIGNE 

fish, and bought the estate of Montaigne, a 
little seigniory near the river Dordogne, not 
very far from the city. His son, Grimon, also 
prospered, and in his turn left to his son, 
Pierre, Montaigne's father, so good a property 
that Pierre was enabled to give up trade, and 
betake himself to arms. Pierre served for 
several years in Italy, under Francis I. On 
his return he married Antoinette de Louppes, 
or Lopes, a rich lady of Spanish descent, with 
some Jewish blood in her veins. He was an 
active, hard-working, conscientious, capable 
man, devoting himself to public affairs. He 
held one office after another in the city of 
Bordeaux, and finally was elected mayor. He 
took especial interest in education, improv- 
ing the schools, and making changes for the 
better in the college. His interest amounted 
to a hobby, if we may judge from his method 
of educating his son. His years in Italy had 
opened his mind, and though no scholar him- 
self, he was a great admirer of the new learn- 
ing, and sought the company of scholars. 
Evidently, he was a man who liked to think, 
and was not afraid to put his ideas into 
practice. He enlarged the seigniory of Mon- 
taigne and rebuilt the chateau. His son says 



MONTAIGNE 105 

of him that he was the best father that ever 
was ; that he was ambitious to do everything 
that was honorable, and had a very high re- 
gard for his word. 

Michel was born on the last day of Febru- 
ary, 1533. He was the third of eleven chil- 
dren ; the two elder died in infancy. His 
education began at once. Still a baby, he 
was put in charge of some peasants who 
lived near the chateau, in order that his 
earliest notions should be of simple things. 
His god-parents were country folk ; for Pierre 
Eyquem deemed it better that his son should 
early learn to make friends " with those who 
stretch their arms toward us rather than with 
those who turn their backs on us." The sec- 
ond step in education was to direct Michel's 
mind so that it should naturally take the he- 
roic Roman mould. His father thought that 
this result would be more likely to follow 
if the baby spoke Latin. He was therefore 
put into the hands of a learned German, who 
spoke Latin very well, and could speak no 
French. There were also two other scholars 
in attendance on the little boy, — less learned, 
however, — who took turns with the German 
in accompanying him. They also spoke no- 



106 MONTAIGNE 

thing but Latin in Michel's presence. ec As 
for the rest of the household, it was an in- 
violable rule that neither my father nor 
mother, nor the man servant nor the maid 
servant, should speak when I was by, except 
some Latin words which they had learned 
on purpose to talk with me." This rule was 
so well obeyed that not only his father and 
mother learned enough Latin to understand 
it and to speak it a little, but also the ser- 
vants who waited on him. In fact, they all 
became so very Latin that even the people 
in the village called various implements and 
utensils by their Latin names. Montaigne 
was more than six years old before he heard 
any French spoken ; he spoke Latin as if it 
were his native tongue. 

At six Montaigne was sent to the College 
of Guyenne, in Bordeaux, where his Latin 
began to get bad, and served no better pur- 
pose than to make his studies so easy that 
he was quickly put into the higher classes. 
He stayed at college till he had completed 
the course in 1546, when he was thirteen 
years old. He says that he took no know- 
ledge of any value away with him. This 
statement must be taken with a grain of 



MONTAIGNE 107 

salt, for he had been under the care of fa- 
mous scholars, and instead of wasting his 
time over poor books or in idleness he had 
read the best Latin authors. He did not 
even know the name of Amadis of Gaul, but 
fell upon Ovid, Virgil, Terence, and Plautus. 
After them he read the Italian comedies. 
This reading was done on the sly, the teach- 
ers winking at it. " Had they not done so," 
he says, " I should have left college with a 
hatred for books, like almost all the young 
nobility." 

Whether or not, so bred, Montaigne be- 
came more like Scipio and Cato Major, his 
father's interest in education no doubt stim- 
ulated his own. In all the shrewdness of 
the Essays there is no more definite and 
practical teaching than his advice on edu- 
cation, especially in his asseverations of its 
large purposes. " There is nothing so no- 
ble," he says, " as to make a man what he 
should be ; there is no learning comparable 
to the knowledge of how to live this life 
aright and according to the laws of nature." 
Montaigne laid down, clearly and sharply, 
principles that sound commonplace to-day : 
that the object of education is to make, not 



108 MONTAIGNE 

a scholar, but a man; that education shall 
concern itself with the understanding rather 
than with the memory ; that mind and body 
must be developed together. It would be 
easy to quote pages. " To know by heart is 
not to know ; it is only holding on to what 
has been put into the custody of the memory. 
. . . We receive as bailiffs the opinions and 
learning of others ; we must make them our 
own. . . . We learn to say Cicero says this, 
Plato thinks this, these are Aristotle's words ; 
but we, what do we say ? What do we do ? 
What is our opinion ? ... If the mind does 
not acquire a better temper, if the judgment 
does not become more sound, I had as lief 
the schoolboy should pass his time playing 
tennis : his body, at least, would be more sup- 
ple. See him come back after years spent : 
there is nothing so unfit for use; all that 
you see more than he had before is that 
his Latin and Greek leave him more silly 
and conceited than when he left home. He 
ought to have brought back a full mind : he 
brings it back blown out ; instead of having 
it bigger, it is only puffed up. ... It is also 
an opinion accepted by everybody that a boy 
ought not to be brought up round his parents' 



MONTAIGNE 109 

knees. Natural affection makes them too ten- 
der and too soft ; they are not able to punish 
his faults, nor to see him nourished hardily, 
as he should be, and run risks. They won't 
let him come back sweating and dusty from 
exercise, drink hot, drink cold, nor see him 
on a horse backwards, nor facing a rough 
fencer foil in hand, nor with his first gun. 
There 's no help for it : if you wish to make 
a man, you must not spare him such matters 
of youth. You must often break the rules 
of medicine. It is not enough to make his 
soul firm ; his muscles must be firm too. 
The soul is too hard pressed if she be not 
supported well, and has too much to do if 
she must furnish strength for both." 

Montaigne himself must have learned the 
value of exercise, for he became a great 
horseman, more at home on horseback than 
on foot. Till the time of ill health he seems 
to have had a vigorous body ; he could sit 
in the saddle for eight or ten hours, and 
survived a very severe fall, though he " vom- 
ited buckets of blood." 

Of Montaigne's life after leaving the col- 
lege we know little or nothing. He must 
have studied law, — perhaps at the Univer- 



110 MONTAIGNE 

sity of Toulouse, perhaps in Bordeaux. But 
matters other than the classics or civil law, 
and more profitable to a great critic of life, 
must have been rumbling in his ears, mak- 
ing him begin to speculate on the opinions 
and customs of men, and their reasonable- 
ness. Already troubles prophetic of civil 
war were afoot. 

Ill 

In 1554 the king established a Court of 
Aids at Perigueux. Pierre Eyquem was ap- 
pointed one of the magistrates, but before 
he took his seat he was elected mayor of 
Bordeaux, and resigned his position as mem- 
ber of the court in favor of his son, who, 
under the system then prevalent, became 
magistrate in his stead. Montaigne was 
twenty-one years old. After a year or two 
the Court of Aids was annulled, and its 
magistrates were made members of the Parle- 
ment of Bordeaux. Here Montaigne met 
Etienne de La Boetie, who was also a mem- 
ber. The two men at once became most lov- 
ing friends. La Boetie had a noble, pas- 
sionate character. Montaigne says that he 
was cast in the heroic mould, an antique 



MONTAIGNE 111 

Roman, the greatest man of their time. Af- 
ter six years La Boetie died, in 1563. Seven- 
teen years later, while traveling in Italy, 
Montaigne wrote to a friend, " All of a sud- 
den I fell to thinking about M. de La Boetie, 
and I stayed so long without shaking the fit 
off that it made me feel very sad." This 
was the master affection of MontaigJie's life, 
and the noblest. It was a friendship " so 
whole, so perfect, that there are none such to 
be read of, and among men to-day there is no 
trace to be seen. There is need of so happy 
a meeting to fashion it that fort one does well 
if it happens once in three hundred years." 
They were wont to call eacL other " brother." 
" In truth, the name of orother is beautiful 
and full of sweetness ; for this reason he and 
I gave it to the bond between us." 

La Boetie died of the plague, or some dis- 
ease like it. He told Montaigne that his 
illness was contagious, and besought him to 
stay with him no more than a few minutes 
at a time, but as often as he could. From 
that time Montaigne never left him. This 
act must be remembered, if we incline to 
blame Montaigne for shunning Bordeaux 
when the plague was upon it. 



112 MONTAIGNE 

v 

Two years afterwards Montaigne married 
^Frangoise de la Chassaigne. It was a match 
made from considerations of suitability. The 
Ey querns were thrifty wooers. Montaigne 
had no romantic notions about love in mar- 
riage ; he did not seek a " Cato's daugh- 
ter " who should help him climb the heights 
of life. He says : " The most useful and 
honorable knowledge and occupation for a 
mother of a family is the knowledge of 
housekeeping. That should be a woman's 
predominant attribute; that is what a man 
should look for when he goes a-courting. 
From what experience has taught me, I 
should require ot a wife, above all other vir- 
tues, that of the housewife." Nevertheless, 
they were very happily married. She was a 
woman of good sense and ability, and looked 
after the affairs of the seigniory with a much 
quicker eye than her husband. He dedicated 
to her a translation made by La Boetie from 
Plutarch. " Let us live," he says, " you and 
me, after the old French fashion. ... I do 
not think I have a friend more intimate 
than you." 

Montaigne remained magistrate for fifteen 
years. He did not find the duties very much 



MONTAIGNE 113 

to his taste, but he must have acquitted 
himself well, because a year or two after his 
retirement the king decorated him with the 
Order of St. Michael. These years of his 
magistracy were calm enough for Montaigne, 
but they were not calm for France. In 1562 
the civil wars broke out. There is some- 
thing too fish-blooded about a man who sits 
in the " back of his shop " and attends to 
his judicial duties or writes essays, clammily 
watching events, while the country is on fire. 
But what has a skeptic to do with divine 
rights of kings or divine revelations? 

Little by little Montaigne was getting 
ready to forsake the magistracy for literature. 
He began by translating, at his father's wish, 
the " Theologia Naturalis " of Raymond de 
Sebonde, — a treatise which undertook to 
establish the truth of the Christian religion 
by a process of reasoning. His father died 
before he finished it. It was published in 
1569. The next year Montaigne resigned 
his seat in the Parlement of Bordeaux, and 
devoted himself to the publication of various 
manuscripts left by La Boetie. This done, 
the new Seigneur de Montaigne — he dropped 
the unaristocratic name of Eyquem — retired 



114 MONTAIGNE 

to his seigniory, " with a resolution to avoid 
all manner of concern in affairs as much as 
possible, and to spend the small remainder 
of his life in privacy and peace. ,, There he 
lived for nine years, riding over his estates, 
planting, tending, — or more wisely suffer- 
ing his wife to superintend, — receiving his 
friends, hospitable, enjoying opportunities 
to talk, or more happy still in his library. 
Here, in the second story of his tower, shut 
off from the buzz of household life, his 
friends, Plutarch, Cicero, Seneca, Herodotus, 
Plato, with a thousand volumes more, on the 
shelves, the ceiling carved with aphorisms, 
Latin and Greek, he used to sit fulfilling his 
inscription : "In the year of Christ 1571, at 
the age of thirty-eight, on his birthday, the 
day before the calends of March, Michel de 
Montaigne, having quitted some time ago 
the servitude of courts and public duties, 
has come, still in good health, to rest among 
the Muses. In peace and safety he will pass 
here what days remain for him to live, in the 
hope that the Fates will allow him to perfect 
this habitation, this sweet paternal asylum 
consecrated to independence, tranquillity, 
and leisure." 



MONTAIGNE 115 

IV 

It was quiet in the Chateau de Montaigne ; 
Plutarch and Cicero sat undisturbed, except 
for notes scribbled on their margins ; but in 
Paris the Duke of Guise and the royal house 
were making St. Bartholomew a memorable 
day. Civil war again ravaged France, the 
League conspired with Spain, Henry of Na- 
varre rallied the Huguenots, while the king, 
Henry III., dangled between them, making 
and breaking edicts. The Seigneur de Mon- 
taigne rode about his estates, or sat in his li- 
brary, writing " Concerning Idleness," " Con- 
cerning Pedantry," " Concerning Coaches," 
" Concerning Solitude," " Concerning Sump- 
tuary Laws." 

The most apathetic of us, knowing that 
Henry of Navarre and Henry of Guise are 
in the field, become so many Hotspurs at 
the thought of this liberal-minded gentle- 
man, the Order of St. Michael hanging 
round his neck, culling anecdotes out of 
Plutarch about Cyrus or Scipio. " Zounds ! 
how has he leisure to be sick in such a jus- 
tling time ! " We readers are a whimsical 
people ; cushioned in armchairs, we catch on 



116 MONTAIGNE 

fire at the white plume of Navarre. What 
is the free play of thought to us ? Give us 
sword and pistol, — Ventre- Saint- Gris ! But 
the best fighting has not been done on bat- 
tlefields, and Montaigne has helped the cause 
of justice and humanity better than twenty 
thousand armed men. 

Once, when there does not seem to have 
been an immediate prospect of a fight, Mon- 
taigne offered his services to one of the 
king's generals. Instead of being ordered 
to the field, he was sent back to Bordeaux 
to harangue the Parlement on the need of 
new fortifications. He was a loyal servant 
of the king, and deemed the Huguenots a 
rebellious faction, fighting against lawful au- 
thority ; but his heart could not take sides ; 
he was disgusted with the hypocrisy of both 
parties, and the mask of religion. "I see 
it is evident that we render only those offices 
to piety which tickle our passions. There is 
no enmity so excellent as the Christian. Our 
zeal does wonders, when it goes following 
our inclination toward hate, cruelty, ambi- 
tion, avarice, detraction, rebellion. But the 
converse, — toward goodness, kindness, tem- 
perance, — if, as by miracle, some rare con- 



MONTAIGNE 117 

junction takes it that way, it goes neither 
afoot nor with wings. Our religion was 
made to pluck out vices ; it uncovers them, 
nurses them, encourages them. . . . Let us 
confess the truth : he that should pick out 
from the army, even the loyal army, those 
who march there only for zeal of religious 
feeling, and also those who singly consider 
the maintenance of their country's laws or 
the service of their sovereign, he could not 
make a corporal's guard of them." 

Montaigne was a Catholic. He did not 
share that passionate care of conduct which 
animated the Keformers. He did not see 
that the truth of a religion was affected by 
the misbehavior of its priests. When he 
heard, in Rome, that " the general of the 
Cordeliers had been deprived of his place, 
and locked up, because in a sermon, in pre- 
sence of the Pope and the cardinals, he had 
accused the prelates of the Church of lazi- 
ness and ostentation, without particularity, 
only, speaking in commonplaces, on this sub- 
ject," Montaigne merely felt that civil lib- 
erty had been abused. He was not troubled 
to find the ceremonies in St. Peter's " more 
magnificent than devotional," nor to learn 



118 MONTAIGNE 

that the Pope, Gregory XIII., had a son. 
He was amused at the luxurious ways of the 
cardinals. He made the acquaintance of the 
maitre d? hotel of Cardinal Caraffa. "I made 
him tell me of his employment. He dis- 
coursed on the science of the gullet with the 
gravity and countenance of a judge, as if 
he had been talking of some grave point of 
theology ; he deciphered a difference of ap- 
petites, — that which one has when hungry, 
that which one has after the second and 
after the third course ; the means first merely 
to please it, then to wake it and prick it ; 
the policy of sauces," etc. He heard on the 
portico of St. Peter's a canon of the Church 
" read aloud a Latin bull, by which an im- 
mense number of people were excommuni- 
cated, among others the Huguenots, by that 
very name, and all princes who withheld 
any of the lands of the Church. At this 
article the cardinals, Medici and Caraffa, who 
were next to the Pope, laughed very hard." 
The Master of the Sacred Palace had sub- 
jected the Essays to examination, and found 
fault with Montaigne's notion that torture in 
addition to death was cruelty. Montaigne 
replied that he did not know that the opinion 



MONTAIGNE 119 

was heretical. To his mind, such matters 
had nothing to do with truth or religion. 
He accepted the Apostolic Roman Catholic 
faith. He was not disposed to take a single 
step out of the fold. If one, why not two ? 
And if reason once mutinied and took con- 
trol, where would it stop? He denied the 
competence of human reason to investigate 
things divine. " Man can only be what he 
is; he can only imagine according to his 
measure." 

To a man who took pleasure in travels, 
foibles, whims, philosophy, to a man of the 
Renaissance full of eagerness to study the 
ancients and to enjoy them, to a man by no 
means attracted by the austerities of the Cal- 
vinists, a war for the sake of supplanting the 
old religion of France was greatly distaste- 
ful. He could not but admit that the Hugue- 
nots were right so far as they only wished 
liberty of worship, nor fail to respect their 
obedience to conscience. But his heart had 
not the heroic temper; he wanted peace, 
comfort, scholarship, elegance. It is one 
thing to sit in a library and admire heroic 
men in the pages of Plutarch, and another 
to enjoy living in the midst of them. 



120 MONTAIGNE 

Montaigne spent these years in pleasant 
peacefulness, dawdling over his library, and 
putting his Essays together scrap by scrap. 
In 1580, at the age of forty-seven, he pub- 
lished the first two books of his Essays, 
which had an immediate and great success. 
After this he was obliged to forego literature 
for a time, because he was not well. He 
had little confidence in doctors, but hoped 
that he could get benefit by drinking natural 
waters. Therefore he went traveling. He 
also wanted to see the world : Eome, with 
which he had been familiar from boyhood, 
and Italy, of which he had heard so much 
from his father, and all strange lands. Per- 
haps, too, he was not unmindful that he was 
now not only the Seigneur de Montaigne, 
but the first man of letters in France, not 
even excepting Ronsard. He set forth in 
the summer of 1580, with his brother and 
several friends, journeying on horseback to 
Switzerland, Germany, and Italy. He kept 
a journal, which contains notes of travel, and 
also a full account of the effects of medicinal 
waters on his health. The interest of the 
journal consists chiefly in the pictures of 
those countries at that time, sketched by an 



MONTAIGNE 121 

intelligent traveler ; but now and again there 
is a more personal interest, when Montaigne 
sees something that excites his curiosity. 
There is a likeness in his curiosity for for- 
eign lands and his curiosity for ideas. He 
travels into Germany as if it were a new vol- 
ume of Plutarch. He is agog for novelty, 
and new ways of life, new points of view. 
His secretary says : " I never saw him less 
tired nor less complaining of ill health ; he 
was in high spirits both traveling and stop- 
ping, so absorbed in what he met, and al- 
ways looking for opportunities to talk to 
strangers. ... I think if he had been alone 
with his servants he would have gone to 
Cracow or to Greece overland, rather than 
directly into Italy." 

In this journal, written first at his direc- 
tion, perhaps at his dictation, by a secretary, 
and then, with some inconvenience, as he 
says, by himself, we find his interests and 
affections in the light and shadow of the 
first impression. In the Essays every para- 
graph is the cud of long rumination. Of 
Rome the journal says : "We see nothing of 
Rome but the sky under which she lies and 
the place of her abode ; knowledge of her 



122 MONTAIGNE 

is an abstraction, framed by thought, with 
which the senses have no concern. Those 
who say that the ruins of Rome at least are 
to be seen say too much, for the ruins of so 
tremendous a fabric would bring more honor 
and reverence to her memory ; here is no- 
thing but her place of burial. The world, 
hostile to her long dominion, has first broken 
and dashed to pieces all the parts of that ad- 
mirable body ; and because, even when dead, 
overthrown and mutilated, she still made the 
world afraid, it has buried even the ruins. 
The little show of them that appears above 
the sepulchre has been preserved by fortune, 
to bear witness to that matchless grandeur 
which centuries, conflagrations, conspiracies 
of a world again and again plotting its ruin, 
have failed to destroy utterly." 

Rome, " the noblest city that ever was or 
ever will be," had laid hold of his imagina- 
tion. He says, "I used all the five senses 
that nature gave me to obtain the title of 
Roman Citizen, if it were only for the an- 
cient honor and religious memory of its au- 
thority." By the help of a friend, the Pope's 
influence procured him this dignity. The 
decree, bearing the S. P. Q. R., " pompous 



MONTAIGNE 123 

with seals and gilt letters," gave him great 
pleasure. 

He showed special interest in strange cus- 
toms, as in the rite of circumcision, and in 
a ceremony of exorcising an evil spirit. This 
examination of other ways of living, other 
habits of thought, is the lever by which he 
lifts himself out of prejudices, out of the 
circle of authority, into his free and open- 
minded state. He always wished to see men 
who looked at life from other points of view. 
In Rome, as his secretary writes, "M. de 
Montaigne was vexed to find so many French- 
men there; he hardly met anybody in the 
street who did not greet him in his own 
tongue." ' In the Essays Montaigne says 
that, for education, acquaintance with men 
is wonderfully good, and also to travel in 
foreign lands ; not to bring back (after the 
fashion of the French nobility) nothing but 
the measures of the Pantheon, but to take 
home a knowledge of foreign ways of thought 
and of behavior, and to rub and polish our 
minds against those of others. 



124 MONTAIGNE 



While abroad, Montaigne received word, 
in September, 1581, that he had been elected 
mayor of Bordeaux, to succeed the Marechal 
de Biron. He hesitated, he had no mind to 
give up his freedom ; but the king sent an 
order, flattering and peremptory, that he 
should betake himself to his office u without 
delay or excuse," and accordingly he went. 

It seems likely that there was some hand 
behind the scenes which pointed out to the 
councilors a man who would be acceptable 
to persons in high place. The Marechal de 
Biron wished to be reelected, but both the 
king and Henry of Navarre, the nominal 
governor of Guyenne, were opposed to him. 
History does not tell what happened, but the 
mayoralty was given to this distinguished, 
quiet gentleman, who had kept carefully 
aloof from partisanship. The office of mayor 
was not very burdensome ; the ordinary duties 
of administration fell upon others. Mon- 
taigne's first term of two years passed un- 
eventfully. De Thou, the historian, who 
knew him at this time, says that he learned 
much from Montaigne, a man "very well 



MONTAIGNE 125 

versed in public affairs, especially in those 
concerning Guyenne, which he knows thor- 
oughly." In 1583 he was reelected. Times 
grew more troubled. On the death of the 
king's brother, Navarre became heir to the 
throne. The League, alarmed, made new 
efforts. Guise made a secret treaty with 
Spain that Navarre should not be recognized 
as king. Coming storms began to blow up 
about Bordeaux. The League plotted to 
seize the city. Poor Montaigne found him- 
self in the midst of excursions and alarms. 
He was glad to lay down his charge when 
his term ended, on July 31, 1585. In June 
a horrible plague broke out, while Montaigne 
was away, and people in Bordeaux died by 
hundreds. The council asked him to come 
to town to preside over the election of his 
successor. He answered, "I will not spare 
my life or anything in your service, and I 
leave you to judge whether what I can do 
for you by my presence at the next election 
makes it worth while for me to run the risk 
of going to town." The council did not in- 
sist, and Montaigne did not go. This is the 
act of his life which has called forth blame, 
not from his contemporaries, but from stout- 



126 MONTAIGNE 

hearted critics and heroic reviewers. To set 
an example of indifference to death is out- 
side the ordinary path of duty. We like to 
hear tell of splendid recklessness of life, of 
fools who go to death out of a mad desire 
to stamp the fear of it under their feet ; and 
when disappointed of so fine a show, we be- 
come petulant, we betray that we are over- 
fond of excitement. It was not the mayor's 
duty to look after the public health ; that 
lay upon the council. 

His office ended, Montaigne went back to 
his library, to revise and correct the first 
two books of his Essays, to stuff them with 
new paragraphs and quotations, and to write 
a third. But he could not retire far enough 
to get away from the sounds of civil war. 
Coutras was but a little too far for him to 
hear Navarre harangue his troops to victory, 
and the voices of the soldiers singing the 
psalm : — 

" This is the day which the Lord hath made 
We will rejoice and be glad in it." 

A few days afterwards Henry of Navarre 
stopped at the chateau and dined with Mon- 
taigne. He had once before been there, 
making a visit of two days, when Montaigne 



MONTAIGNE 127 

was still mayor. The relations of these two 
men are interesting, but somewhat difficult 
to decipher. De Thou relates that Mon- 
taigne talked to him about Henry of Navarre 
and the Duke of Guise, and their hatred one 
of the other, and said : " As for religion, 
both make parade of it ; it is a fine pretext 
to make those of their party follow them. 
But the interest of religion does n't touch 
either of them ; only the fear of being aban- 
doned by the Protestants prevents the king 
of Navarre from returning to the religion of 
his ancestors, and the duke would betake 
himself to the Augsburg Confession, for 
which his uncle, Charles, Cardinal of Lor- 
raine, had given him a taste, if he could 
follow it without prejudice to his interests." 
But Navarre, though he was open-minded 
on the subject of creeds, and a most dexter- 
ous politician, was a noble and loyal gentle- 
man, as Montaigne, with his keen, unpreju- 
diced eyes, could well see. Navarre had 
been bred a Protestant, his friends were Pro- 
testants, and he would not forswear his reli- 
gion so long as abjuration might work harm 
to them. When his conversion became of 
great moment to France, and promised to 



128 MONTAIGNE 

confer the blessings of peace on the country 
without hurt to the Protestants, he turned 
Catholic. This was conduct such as Mon- 
taigne would most heartily approve. Henry 
IV. acted as if he had been nursed on the 
Essays. And there is much to show that De 
Thou's conversation is a very incorrect ac- 
count of Montaigne's opinion of Henry. 

After Henry had succeeded to the throne, 
and was still struggling with the League, 
Montaigne wrote to him: "I have always 
thought of you as enjoying the good for- 
tune to which you have come, and you may 
remember that, even when I was obliged to 
confess it to the cure, I always hoped for 
your success. Now, with more cause and 
more freedom, I salute it with full affection. 
Your success serves you where you are, but 
it serves you no less here by reputation. 
The noise does as much as the shot. We 
could not draw from the justice of your 
cause arguments to establish or win your 
subjects so strong as we do from the news 
of the prosperity of your enterprises. . . . 
The inclinations of people flow in a tide. If 
the incline is once in your favor, it will 
sweep on of its own weight, to the very end. 



MONTAIGNE 129 

I should have liked very much that the pri- 
vate gain of your soldiers and the need of 
making them content had not deprived you, 
especially in this great city, of the noble 
commendation of having treated your rebel- 
lious subjects, in the hour of victory, with 
more consideration than their own protec- 
tors do ; and that, differently from a transi- 
tory and usurped claim, you had shown that 
they were yours by a fatherly and truly 
royal protection." The letter shows admira- 
tion and comprehension of the king, and an 
intimacy honorable to both. There was some 
invitation for Montaigne to come to court, 
and an offer of money, but he answered : 
"Sire, your Majesty will do me, if you 
please, the favor to believe that I will never 
stint my purse on an occasion for which I 
would not spare my life. I have never re- 
ceived any money from the liberality of 
kings, — I have neither asked nor deserved 
it; I have never received payment for the 
steps I have taken in their service, of which 
your Majesty in part has knowledge. What 
I have done for your predecessors I will do 
very much more willingly for you. I am, 
Sire, as rich as I desire." But ill health 



130 MONTAIGNE 

would not permit him to go, even if he had 
wished. 

In the mean time Montaigne had been in 
Paris (in 1588) to publish a new edition of 
the Essays. There he formed the acquaint- 
ance of Mademoiselle de Gournay, a young 
lady of twenty, who had conceived a great 
enthusiasm for the Essays. Montaigne called 
her his adopted daughter. After his death, 
helped by Madame de Montaigne, she de- 
voted herself to the preparation of a new 
edition of the Essays, with all the last 
changes and additions that the author had 
made. 

Montaigne spent the last few years of his 
life on his seigniory. He lived quietly, his 
health growing worse, till he died, on Sep- 
tember 13, 1592, at the age of fifty-nine. It 
is said that when he felt his death near, no 
longer able to speak, he wrote a little note 
asking his wife to summon several gentlemen 
of the neighborhood, that he might take 
leave of them. When they had come, he 
had mass said in his room ; and when the 
priest came to the elevation of the host, he 
threw himself forward as best he could, his 
hands clasped, and so died. 



MONTAIGNE 131 

VI 

We are wont to call a man of letters great 
when many generations of men can go to his 
book, read what he says on the subject that 
concerns them, — conduct, religion, love, the 
significance of life, — and find that he has 
cast some light, or at least has shifted the 
problem. Such is Montaigne. There were 
greater men living in his time, Shakespeare, 
Cervantes ; but life plies many questions to 
which poetry and idealism give no direct an- 
swer. If a man would look serenely upon 
the world, and learn the lesson that " ripe" 
ness is all," he must go to the poet and to 
the idealist, but he must go to the skeptic, 
too. Uncertainty is one of our lessons, and 
what man has talked so wisely and so per- 
suasively as Montaigne concerning matters 
that lie at the threshold of the great ques- 
tions of religion and philosophy, which must 
underlie all reasonable life ? Hear him, for 
instance, after finding fault with an exces- 
sive credulity, blaming its opposite : " But 
also, on the other part, it is presumptuous 
and foolish to go about disdaining and con- 
demning as false that which does not seem 



132 MONTAIGNE 

probable to us. This is a vice common to 
those who think they have an intelligence 
out of the ordinary. I had that habit once, 
and if I heard of ghosts or prophecies of 
future events, or of magic, of witchcraft, or 
some wonderful story which I could not en- 
dure, I felt compassion for the poor people 
abused by this nonsense. Now I find that 
I myself was at least as much to be pitied. 
Not that I have ever had any experience be- 
yond my first beliefs, and nothing has ever 
appealed to my curiosity ; but reason has 
taught me that to condemn finally a thing 
as false and impossible is to claim to com- 
prehend the boundaries and limits of the 
will of God and of the power of our mother 
Nature, and that there is no more remark- 
able folly in the world than to bring them 
down to the measurements of our capacity 
and intelligence. If we give the names 
monsters or miracles, there where our rea- 
son cannot go, how many continually come 
before our eyes ? Consider in what a mist, 
and how gropingly, we come to a knowledge 
of most things that are under our hands ; 
we shall find that it is familiarity, not know- 
ledge, which has taken the strangeness away, 



MONTAIGNE 133 

and that, if those things were presented to 
us afresh, we should find them as much or 
more unbelievable than any others." 

Montaigne commends us to a prudent but 
brave open-mindedness. He warns us against 
the dogmas of affirmation and the dogmas of 
denial. He bids us pause and consider. No- 
thing could be more wrong than the vulgar 
notion that Montaigne has something in 
common with Mephistopheles, the spirit that 
denies. He was a skeptic ; but a single 
epithet is always incorrect. He was a be- 
liever, too. He believed in education, in hu- 
manity, in tolerance, in the many-sidedness 
of life, in the infinite power of God, in the 
nobleness of humanity. Nothing excites his 
indignation so violently as the "great sub- 
tlety" of those men who sneer at heroic 
deeds, and attribute noble performance to 
mean motives. He makes no pretense of 
special interest in conduct ; but conduct is 
not his business, — he is concerned with the 
philosophy which underlies conduct. Some 
men are impatient for action ; they will be- 
lieve this, that, anything, for an excuse to be 
up and doing. Montaigne is not a man of 
action ; he feels uncomfortable when within 



134 MONTAIGNE 

hearing of the whir and rush of life; he 
likes to retire into the " back of his shop " 
to get away and be quiet. He was for con- 
templation and meditation. It was this 
shrinking from action that made him a skep- 
tic. Action is the affirmation of belief, but 
also its begetter. I believe because I act. 
The heart beats, the blood circulates, the 
breath comes and goes, the impatient muscles 
do not wait for the tardy reason to don hat 
and overcoat, arms twitch, legs start, and the 
man is plunged into the hurly-burly of life. 
There he goes, in the midst of a crowd of 
human beings, hurrying, struggling, squirm- 
ing, all filled to surfeit with most monstrous 
beliefs. Montaigne's heart beats more slowly ; 
he is in no hurry to act ; the meaning of 
life will not yield to mere importunity ; let 
us keep cool. " If any difficulties occur in 
reading, I do not bite my nails about them, 
but, after an attempt or two to explain them, 
I give them over. Should I insist upon 
them, I should lose both myself and my 
time ; for I have a genius that is extremely 
volatile, and what I do not discern at the 
first attempt becomes the more obscure to 
me the longer I pore over it. . . . Continua- 



MONTAIGNE 135 

tion and a too obstinate contention stupefy 
and tire my judgment. I must withdraw it, 
and leave it, to make new discoveries, just 
as, in order to judge rightly of the lustre of 
scarlet, we are ordered to pass it lightly with 
the eye, and to run it over at several sudden 
repeated views." 

Montaigne is of the Latin people, men of 
the south, children of the market place and 
the piazza. He sits in peacefulness, watch- 
ing the comedy and tragedy of the world. 
He lives apart ; for him life is a show, a 
school for philosophy, a subject for essays. 
If you have been bred in the Adirondacks 
or on the slope of Monadnock, up betimes, 
to tire your legs all the long day, and at 
evening to watch the setting sun and listen 
for the first call of the owl, you will not like 
Montaigne. There, in the morning of life, 
the blue sky overhead, the realities of life 
looking so strong and so noble, the specula- 
tions of a skeptic come like a cloud of dust. 
Montaigne is not for the young man. Youth 
has convictions ; its f eelings purport absolute 
verity ; it possesses reality : why go a-fish- 
ing for dreams ? But when the blood runs 
cooler, when we are glad to be safe on earth, 



136 MONTAIGNE 

when of a winter's evening we listen to the 
pleasant shoot of the bolt that shall keep us 
to ourselves, and draw up to the fire, then 
Montaigne is supreme. He is so agreeable, 
so charming, so skillful in taking up one 
subject, then another, so well practiced in 
conversation, so perfect a host. We are 
translated into his library. He wanders 
about the room, taking from his shelves one 
book after another, opening them at random, 
reading a scrap, and then talking about it. 
On he goes, talking wisely, wittily, kindly, 
while the flickering firelight plays over his 
sensitive, intelligent face, and the Gascon 
moon shines in patches on the floor, till the 
world we are used to dissolves under his 
talk, and its constituent parts waver and 
flicker with the firelight. Everything aerifies 
into dream-made stuff, out of which our fancy 
builds a new world, only to see it again dis- 
solve and fade under his bewitching talk. 

Montaigne talks of himself. But his self 
is not the vulgar self of the gossip ; it is the 
type and model of humanity. Like a great 
artist, he makes himself both individual and 
type. He is the psychologist studying man. 
He is his own laboratory, his own object of 



MONTAIGNE 137 

examination. When we try to discover the 
movements of the mind, have we any choice ? 
Must we not examine ourselves ? He does 
not bring us to himself for the mere exhilara- 
tion of talking about himself. His subject 
is man ; through the windows of man's mind 
he makes us gaze at the universe, forever 
reiterating in our ears that man is a prisoner 
in the four walls of his mind, chafe how he 
will. If this be egotism, it is egotism with 
all its teeth drawn. 

Skeptic, philosopher, abstracted from the 
world, Montaigne nevertheless does not shirk 
when the choice comes between speaking 
out and keeping silent. He had something 
sturdy at bottom. We cannot repeat too 
often his " We must rend the mask from 
things as well as from men." This is no 
easy task. Even the strength of the young 
mountaineer may not suffice. Masks famil- 
iar to us all our lives become very dear ; let 
us leave them, — there are other things to 
do. Is there not something ignoble in this 
use of our courage, to maltreat an old, ven- 
erable appearance ? Give us some work of 
poetry and romance ; bid us scale heaven. 
And so the masks of things remain unre- 



138 MONTAIGNE 

moved. There is in Montaigne always the 
admiration of the heroic. " All other know- 
ledge is useless to him who does not know 
how to be good. . . . The measure and the 
worth of a man consist in his heart and will ; 
in them is the home of his honor. . . . True 
victory lieth in the fight, not in coming off 
safely ; and the honor of courage is in com- 
bat, not in success." Of the three philoso- 
phies which he studied, the Epicurean, the 
Pyrrhonian, the Stoic, his heart was inclined 
to the last, and I think he would rather have 
had a nod of approval from Cato the younger 
than have heard Sainte-Beuve salute him as 
the wisest of Frenchmen. 



MACAULAY 



MACAULAY 



The history of England is the great ro- 
mance of the modern world. The story of 
the rise, triumph, decline and fall of the 
Roman Empire is more dramatic ; it would 
be impossible to match in interest the narra- 
tive of that Roman people from their cra- 
dle on the Palatine Hill until they walked 
abroad masters of the world. But England 
is now living in the height of her pride and 
power, the great civilizing force of this cen- 
tury. Sprung from the mingled blood of 
Celt, Saxon, Scandinavian, and Norman, the 
Englishman has made his island home a gar- 
den of poetry, a school of government for 
the nations, the factory of the world : — 

" This happy breed of men, this little world ; 
This precious stone set in the silver sea." 

The story of England outdoes the Waver- 
ley Novels. Its panorama extends like the 
visions of an enchanter : the mightiest Julius 



142 MACAULAY 

lands ; legionaries build walls and camps, and 
withdraw ; wild men struggle with wild men ; 
missionaries teach the Pater Noster to awk- 
ward lips ; petty kingdoms weld together ; 
Saxons strike down Celts ; Normans strike 
down Saxons ; Crusaders cross the seas ; Run- 
nymede listens to a great charter; English 
judges and English priests struggle against 
the dominion of Roman law and Roman the- 
ology ; Hotspurs and Warwicks march across 
the stage ; sons of serfs are born free men , 
English kings lay claims to the lands of 
France ; books are printed ; rebellions break 
out against the Roman pontiffs ; traders and 
sailors roam abroad ; Bacon reasons ; Shake- 
speare dramatizes ; the nation shuffles off the 
coil of royal tyranny; Royal Societies are 
founded ; weavers weave ; spinners spin ; 
bobbins and shuttles load ships; chapter 
succeeds chapter, till the great volume of 
the nineteenth century is reached. 

England has created the best and freest 
government in the world ; England has made 
the greatest literature ; England has brought 
forth Bacon, Newton, Darwin ; England has 
wrought the only system of law that can 
match that of Rome ; England has sent forth 



MACAULAY 143 

"comme un vol de gerfauts," adventurers, 
colonizers, civilizers ; England, by Drake and 
Howard of Effingham, has annexed the Chan- 
nel to her coast ; England has sent westward 
Ealeigh and Cabot, Pilgrims to Massachu- 
setts, younger sons to Virginia, Wolfe to 
Canada, Clive and Warren Hastings to In- 
dia, Dampier and Cook to Australia, Gordon 
and Kitchener to Egypt, incorporating vi 
et armis great regions of the earth to have 
and to hold to her and her English heirs 
forever. 

Amid such prodigal wealth of harvest 
there is room for many husbandmen. Hol- 
inshed and Froissart may chronicle legend 
and foray ; Bacon may find a narrative that 
shall lead to political preferment ; Hakluyt 
may gather yarns together that shall stop 
the question, " What have the indolent Eng- 
lish done at sea ? " Clarendon may prove the 
badness of a fallen cause ; Hume may un- 
cover plentiful proofs of Tory virtue ; Napier 
may track the " thin red line of heroes " 
threading the mountains of Spain. Out of 
the hundred facets an historian may select 
that one which flashes most light to him. 
Froude may praise the red hands of Eliza- 



144 MACAULAY 

bethan marauders ; Gardiner may follow end- 
less links of cause and effect ; Freeman may 
find explanations for his own historic doubts ; 
Lingard may gratify Koman Catholics ; Green 
may avoid personal prejudices. English his- 
tory has great garners laden with probabili- 
ties, theories, interests, and facts, protean 
enough to satisfy the most wanton historical 
desires. 

By the side of the gay and splendid colors 
of English history, there are large quiet 
spaces of sombre hues, dull to the indolent 
eye. While heroes, paladins, and champions 
have been caracoling conspicuous ; sad-vis- 
aged, shrewd, resolute men have been stead- 
ily working, plodding, planning, construct- 
ing, — commonly behind the scenes, but not 
always. Men who gradually, step by step, 
sadly and surely enlarging precedent, piecing 
and patching, wrought the common law ; who 
slowly and steadfastly built up the pious and 
sombre creeds and practices of the Noncon- 
formist churches of England. Such men 
have had a great and controlling influence 
on the development of modern England. 
They have been the burghers as opposed to 
landowners or yeomen; of the middle class 



MACAULAY 145 

as against the aristocracy and the plebeians ; 
the educated in distinction from the learned 
or the ignorant. They have been the dis- 
senters and low churchmen ; they have been 
the party of advance, the advocates of petty 
changes, the practical men busy with daily 
needs, careless of sentiments and theories, 
taking care of the pennies of life. 

They are the men of double entry, magni- 
fying routine. In business they have added 
mechanical device to mechanical device ; they 
have put wind, water, steam, and electricity 
into subjection ; they have done most of the 
reckoning in England, and their brains are 
hieroglyphed with I. s. d. They have built 
up cities, adding house to house, block to 
block, factory to factory; they also have 
made a man's house his castle. The magic 
of science does not affect them. It is a mon- 
ster, a Caliban, for its usefulness they would 
not heed it, — 

" But, as 't is, 
We cannot miss him : he does make our fire, 
Fetch in our wood, and serves in offices 
That profit us. What ho ! slave ! " 

In literature they have sustained the names 
that have been forgotten ; of art they are in- 



146 MACAULAY 

nocent; in religion they are for the Old Tes- 
tament ; in English politics they are Whigs 
and Liberals. They made the revolution of 
1688 ; they passed the Act of Settlement, — 
a formal declaration of an accepted principle 
that no king had divine rights in Great Bri- 
tain ; they maintained the House of Hanover. 
This cautious, industrious, peering-round- 
the-corner class is not attractive to everybody. 
We miss the glitter and the purple of osten- 
tatious heroism ; we feel the absence of lux- 
ury, of recklessness, of epigram, of sangfroid. 
Nevertheless, that class constitutes most of 
the machinery of the civilized world, calling 
itself the party of progress, known to its 
enemies as Mr. Gradgrind, Mr. Worldly-wise, 
Mr. Stay-at-home. This difference between 
the manufacturer and the country squire, the 
artisan and the soldier, the practical man 
and the idealist, an eye fixed on the present 
and an eye roaming over the past or future, 
between Whig and Tory, is the line of de- 
marcation between two kinds of minds : the 
Benjamin Franklin character, inclined to wise 
saws, wise doubts, wise practices and experi- 
ments ; and the Dr. Johnson temperament, 
bowing to authority, custom, the ways of 



MACAULAY 147 

grandfathers, the traditions of grandmo- 
thers, full of crotchets, prejudices, beliefs, 
and idealism. 

If one looks at these classes from the point 
of view of the reader on winter evenings, the 
attractions of Tory history (to use the politi- 
cal epithet), English conquests, English em- 
pire, English traditions, English poetry, are 
beyond comparison more entertaining than 
histories of the common law, of Presbyte- 
rian synods, of factory acts, of Manchesters 
and Birminghams. But when the world is 
quiet and the politics of England can regu- 
late themselves by private morality and by 
the maxims of Poor Kichard's Almanac, the 
outwardly uninteresting class is sure to be in 
power. The great wealth of England, the 
moral tone of her literature, the humane 
standard among her common clergy, the sav- 
ing ballast in her ship of state, are all tri- 
umphs of the Whigs. 

Two generations ago the chief historians 
of England, Clarendon, Hume, Lingard, had 
done little justice to the achievements of 
utility and progress ; it was time that an ad- 
vocate should arise to show the real value 
of the work of the middle classes. Justice 



148 MACAULAY 

demanded that at the bar of public opinion a 
zealous believer should plead the cause of the 
Whigs. Up rose Thomas Babington Macau- 
lay, and first in the " Edinburgh Review/' 
and afterwards in his History, eulogized 
their political achievements with amazing elo- 
quence. All that he has written on the sub- 
ject has been a splendid repetition of his words 
on his election as member for Edinburgh : 
"I look with pride on all that the Whigs 
have done for the cause of human freedom 
and of human happiness." 

II 

As a political party, during Macaulay's 
boyhood and early youth, the Whigs were at 
a low point of their power. The horrors of 
the Reign of Terror in Paris, the gigantic 
attempt of Napoleon to subdue the world, the 
obvious necessity of war, the glories of the 
Nile, Trafalgar, of Torres Vedras and Wa- 
terloo, had kept the majority of Englishmen 
in the Tory ranks. But after Napoleon had 
been caged in St. Helena ; after the Holy 
Alliance had guaranteed the peace of Eu- 
rope ; after the change from war to peace had 
thrown business into confusion, the minds 



MACAULAY 149 

of Englishmen were free to meditate on the 
defects of the time. The law, especially in 
the Court of Chancery, dragged itself along 
in loops of unjust delay ; the criminal law 
was barbarously severe ; slavery still prevailed 
in England's colonies ; the slave trade had 
but lately been suppressed ; Roman Catholics 
were disfranchised ; the Church had fallen 
into the hands of ignorant parsons ; the House 
of Commons was in the power of nobles and 
great landowners. But the tide was turn- 
ing. The Tories were losing their bulwark 
of French fears ; Lord Eldon and the Duke 
of Wellington were growing old ; while to the 
support of the Whigs came the great force 
of the early nineteenth century. Machinery 
was developing Leeds, Manchester, and Bir- 
mingham ; machinery was doubling their pop- 
ulation and influence ; machinery was mak- 
ing manufacturers rich, urging them to power 
and freedom from old restraints. Weaving 
and spinning were forcing the landed inter- 
ests into matters of secondary importance. 
The factories of England were calling to Glas- 
gow, Liverpool, and London to cover the sea 
with English ships ; and English commerce 
answered to the call. Behind machinery 



150 MACAULAY 

stood the great genie steam, of pure Whig 
principles, practical, energetic, heedless of the 
past, eager for new things. 

For a long time the opposition to old cus- 
toms, habits of mind, ways of thought and 
action had needed a mouthpiece. Believers 
in change, advocates of novelty, critics of 
what is and has been, stood in need of a 
standard-bearer, especially in Scotland, where 
the rising genius of Walter Scott was pran- 
cing like " proud Cumberland." The spirit 
of revolt was ready for articulate voice. 
About the time when Macaulay was born, 
Sydney Smith, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Hor- 
ner, and Henry Brougham met in their " gar- 
ret " in Edinburgh, and founded the " Edin- 
burgh Review." That review now is part of 
old political and literary history. The lives 
of its founders have been written, their essays 
have been collected, and the modern reader 
ignorant of foes who have been long since 
killed and buried, when he sees these doughty 
champions belaboring thin air, wonders why 
the founders of the " Edinburgh Review " are 
still remembered. The youngest of them 
and the most remarkable was Brougham. 
He contributed many articles to the early 



MACAULAY 151 

numbers, and continued to write for it 
throughout his life ; he wrote in all as many 
as two hundred essays. 

Brougham was a man of enormous activ- 
ity, an agitator, attacking with voice and pen 
hundreds of abuses with perpetual vigor and 
audacity. He worked with Wilberf orce and 
Lord Holland against slavery and the slave 
trade. He assailed the Orders in Council, 
the Income Tax, the foes of Queen Caroline, 
the enemies of law reform. He fought for 
the diffusion of education. He argued, ha- 
rangued, and debated in Parliament with 
the vigor of ten. He led the bar on the 
Northern circuit. He thundered against Lord 
Eldon day and night. He discoursed be- 
fore reforming societies. He lectured to 
leagues for the promotion of scientific know- 
ledge. Brougham became one of the most 
famous men in the House of Commons, and 
after the Whig triumph, when Lord Grey 
came into power in 1830, he was given the 
Great Seal. Such a powerful turbulent spirit 
exerted great influence on the Keview. He 
disliked Macaulay, — out of jealousy, as 
Macaulay thought, — and when Jeffrey re- 
signed his position as editor, Brougham 



152 MACAULAY 

threw his weight against the proposal that 
Macaulay should succeed him. 

Sydney Smith was the oldest of the 
founders, and a far more typical Whig than 
Brougham. He was the embodiment of the 
qualities which give its character to the Eng- 
lish Church. Better than any history, Syd- 
ney Smith sets forth the practical morality, 
the subordination of religion to the business 
of living, the intolerance of mysticism, the 
high esteem of common sense, which distin- 
guishes the English Church. Sydney Smith 
was a good man, an excellent parson, a 
shrewd preacher. He looked on life from 
the standpoint of common sense ; he was in- 
terested in practical results. He thought 
that the problems of government, of reli- 
gion, of living, were all to be solved by in- 
telligence and patience. He brought his wit 
to the service of the liberal cause, and was 
perhaps the most effective contributor to the 
Review before Macaulay. 

Francis Horner is generally forgotten. He 
was a man of hard integrity and of studious 
mind, with a leaning to metaphysics, eco- 
nomics, and other studies then specially cul- 
tivated in Edinburgh. Sydney Smith said 



MACAULAY 153 

that he had the Ten Commandments written 
on his face. Horner died before he was 
forty, cutting short a career in the House of 
Commons that was assured of distinguished 
success. 

Francis Jeffrey was the controlling influ- 
ence in this group of men. He guided and 
governed. He selected and sifted ; he kept 
on good terms with the fiery Brougham. 
He looked on the Review as a factor in civi- 
lization, and, it seems, hesitated to make it 
a purely party organ. But Walter Scott and 
Tory friends started the Quarterly in 1809, 
and the " Edinburgh Review " thereupon be- 
came identified with the Whig political party. 
Jeffrey must have been a very attractive 
man ; Sydney Smith was very fond of him ; 
Brougham remained faithful to him; Scott 
speaks affectionately of him. He was most 
kind to Macaulay. In his old age Macau- 
lay's success with the " History of England " 
delighted him : " My dear Macaulay, the 
mother that bore you, had she been yet 
alive, could scarcely have felt prouder or 
happier than I do at this outburst of your 
graver fame." Jeffrey's essays have be- 
come things of the past. The cold Words- 



154 MACAULAY 

worthian, in his less worthy moods, looks up 
the famous sentences of blame once so much 
applauded. The opinions of literary men, 
unless they chance to catch what succeeding 
generations hold to be truth, or have dinted 
their personality on their sentences, pass with 
the harvests of last year. Macaulay gives 
Jeffrey most generous praise, but Macaulay 
spoke from a grateful heart. 

In 1825 Jeffrey, not aware of all the forces 
that were working on the Whig side, was 
eagerly seeking young men of talents, when 
he came upon a man of twenty-four, of fluent 
speech, of prodigious memory and informa- 
tion, and untrammeled by a single doubt. 
Young Macaulay contributed to the August 
number his essay on Milton. 

Ill 

The Macaulays were Scotch. An anecdote 
of Lord Macaulay's grandfather, who was one 
of the ministers at Inverary when Dr. John- 
son went thither on his trip to the Hebrides, 
is told by Bo swell, which gives an intima- 
tion that in the Macaulay blood there was 
both that readiness to block out a man's 
character and make it all of a piece, and 



MACAULAY 155 

that lack of sensitive imagination, of which 
we find strong marks in the " History of 
England." " When Dr. Johnson spoke of 
people whose principles were good, but whose 
practice was faulty, Mr. M'Aulay said, he had 
no notion of people being in earnest in their 
good professions whose practice was not suit- 
able to them. The Doctor grew warm, and 
said, ' Sir, are you so grossly ignorant of hu- 
man nature, as not to know that a man may 
be very sincere in good principles, without 
having good practice ? ' This is character- 
istic Tory criticism of characteristic Whig 
belief. 

This minister's son Zachary was of the 
Scotch Puritan type. Early bred to busi- 
ness he went at sixteen to Jamaica, where 
he learned to hate negro slavery; he gave 
up his position in consequence, went back 
to England at about twenty-four years of 
age, and was sent out to Sierra Leone by a 
company formed in the interest of liberated 
slaves. There he remained as governor of the 
colony till 1799, when he returned to Eng- 
land and married a Miss Mills, the daughter 
of a Quaker of Bristol. On October 25, 1800, 
Thomas Babington Macaulay was born. 



156 MACAULAY 

One of Macaulay's many bits of good for- 
tune has been his biographer ; Trevelyan is 
unsurpassed by any Englishman except Bos- 
well. In the " Life and Letters of Lord 
Macaulay," the precocious boy, the brilliant 
young man, appears in a holiday dress of 
delightful anecdotes. In that wonderful 
youth it is difficult to tell what effect Macau- 
lay's father and mother had upon him. His 
father served the anti-slavery cause, in com- 
pany of Wilberf orce and Thornton, with stern 
and tireless devotion. He appears to have 
looked on his son somewhat as a means 
which God had given him for the execution 
of a great plan ; not that there was any lack 
of affection, but the son never could have 
had the pleasure of beholding in his father 
a purpose to secure for him the fullness of 
life, never could have realized except in 
imagination that a father might bestow upon 
his son the education of mere prodigal love. 
Macaulay's mother was a devout woman, 
somewhat given to that pious phraseology 
which is tolerable only in privacy. There 
is a picture of evangelical Clapham — that 
part of London where the Macaulays lived — 
in " The Newcomes." Colonel Newcome's 



MACAULAY 157 

father lived there ; his brothers Hobson and 
Brian were bred there. But Trevelyan will 
not grant much truth to this picture. 

After preparation at a small school Macau- 
lay went into residence at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, in October, 1818. Derwent Cole- 
ridge, Praed, and a certain brilliant Charles 
Austin were among his intimates. Although 
already a great reader, Macaulay did not live 
in books only; he took keen interest in poli- 
tics, wrote prize poems, talked early and late. 
He had no liking for mathematics, for sci- 
ence, or for athletic exercises. He seems to 
have been at that time very much what he 
was in later years ; with the same zeal, the 
same quick spirit, and with those prodigious 
powers of reading and of remembering, of 
which the like have never been known. In 
1822 he won the prize for the best essay on 
the "Conduct and Character of William HI." 
Trevelyan says that the characters of James 
and of William, the Popish Plot, the license 
of the Restoration, " are drawn on the same 
lines and painted in the same colors" as they 
are in his History. This is characteristic of 
the man. Macaulay lacked the advantage 
of slowness in intellectual development, which 



158 MACAULAY 

enables a growing mind to feed upon fitting 
food in the advancing stages of its develop- 
ment. His capacity for sympathy seems to 
have been of a certain quality, receptive 
only within definite limits ; it had no elasti- 
city to admit new classes of interests. His 
enormous fund of information did him a 
certain injury by coddling, as it were, the 
stunted side of his imagination. It assured 
him that his judgment had not been taken 
without a complete survey of all reasonably 
available means of knowledge. It lent all 
the weight of precocious erudition to opin- 
ions formed too easily, and shut him off 
from the elementary truth that not informa- 
tion, but sensitiveness to many sides of hu- 
manity, helps a man to just judgments. His 
views were clear, definite, susceptible of sup- 
port from many arguments, and honest as 
the day ; but he never had the education of 
a great private personal emotion. He never 
was in love ; he never comprehended the 
meaning of religion. Untouched by these 
two great causes of human growth, Macaulay 
left Cambridge a very efficient machine, self- 
possessed, ready, eloquent, of high principle, 
careless of vulgar success, with certain pecu- 



MACAULAY 159 

liar powers of mind which in their order 
have not been surpassed if they have ever 
been equalled. 

Macaulay was called to the bar in 1826 ; 
he went on the Northern circuit, where he 
met Brougham, but it seems that he had lit- 
tle or no practice. His inclination lay in 
other directions ; he displayed his oratory 
before various societies, and his literary tal- 
ents in " Knight's Quarterly Magazine.' ' In 
1825 his essay on Milton had been published 
in the " Edinburgh Review," and he was at 
once treated by notable men of twice his age 
with distinguished consideration. Perhaps 
it was a misfortune for a brilliant young 
man of Scotch ancestry, bred at home in an 
evangelical, anti-slavery air, trained to com- 
plete self-possession at Cambridge, to find 
himself of instant consequence to the great 
Whig organ. He was thereby subjected to 
influences which strengthened his tenden- 
cies of mind and cut him off from all sym- 
pathy with opposite opinions; so that the 
very virtues of conservatism, of unreasoning 
emotions, stood over against him as so many 
enemies to be battled with. 

Petted and praised by the men whom he 



160 MACAULAY 

had learned to look upon as the salt of Eng- 
land, sought after by that Review for which 
Sydney Smith, the great wit, Jeffrey, the 
great critic, Brougham, the great reformer, 
were eager to write, applauded by the whole 
reading world of London, Macaulay had no 
chance to repair the defects of his inherit- 
ance and of his education. The essay on 
Milton is not one of Macaulay' s best, — he 
was but twenty-four years old, — yet it bears 
the well-known characteristics of Macaulay's 
style : clearness with no shadow of doubt ; 
the assurance that only a little patience and 
common sense are needed, and all the con- 
fusion that time, custom, and prejudice have 
thrown around the important matters of life 
will uncurl and drop off, leaving one face to 
face with certainty ; the brilliant mastery of 
rhetoric which satisfies the immediate appe- 
tite of the mind ; the powerful arguments 
of the orator which upon one hearing are 
not to be resisted ; the positiveness of com- 
mon sense, the definiteness of complete com- 
prehension, the art of prologue and exor- 
dium, of paragraph and sentence, of commas 
and semicolons. All his life Macaulay was 
convinced that truth is as clear as day, and 



MACAULAY 161 

that if a man has knowledge of his subject 
and is neither a bigot nor a fool, he need 
only write clearly and all people past rudi- 
mentary intelligence and shell-form educa- 
tion will receive light and be converted. He 
felt the burden of Whig duty upon his shoul- 
ders ; he must show the right and describe 
the wrong, portray justice and reveal injus- 
tice, exhibit the beneficial and expose the 
hurtful, put the light of good literature on a 
hill and snuff the candle of the bad. Ma- 
caulay had the highest aims and the noblest 
aspirations that are compatible with complete 
mental subjection to the practical, to the use- 
ful, to the mechanical parts of life. He is 
intolerant of wrong, because wrong is his 
adversary, and his adversary is wrong. He 
hates injustice ; has not injustice been ranged 
with Stuarts, pretenders, slavery, Popery, and 
all the evils he is resolute to combat ? He 
abhors cruelty ; it is inextricably bound up 
with bigotry, fanatical loyalty, intolerant 
privileges. He is a man of party ; he enjoys 
friends, he delights in enemies. He rejoices 
in his own strength, and hits out from the 
shoulder. 

He who looks back over two generations 



162 MACAULAY 

at the fierce battles of the past finds it easy 
to see virtue and wrong on each side, dis- 
covers the vanity of the victory and the hol- 
lowness of the defeat, and in his armchair, 
turning over books, smiles at the fiery zeal and 
convictions of men long buried. None the 
less is it important for him that the battle 
has been fought, that the side on which there 
was a slight preponderance of right should 
have conquered. We may wonder at the 
emotions of those who fought the political 
fight over the Reform Act, with somewhat of 
the same compassion that we read of Atha- 
nasian and Arian, but we need to remember 
that not the indolent skepticisms of the past, 
but its vigorous energies and convictions, 
have removed stones and uprooted thorns 
from our path. 

IV 

The great struggle between the old po- 
litical institutions of England and the new 
political needs of the middle classes was first 
fought over the question of Roman Catholic 
Emancipation. The reformers won. The 
Test Acts were old statutes enacted in the 
time of Charles II., and required all officers, 



MACAULAY 163 

civil and military, under the government to 
take the communion according to the rites 
of the Anglican Church. Thereafter those 
Acts had been in substance amended by 
allowing dissenters to be relieved from the 
penalties of the original Acts, but they had 
remained in full force against the Catholics. 
These Acts were repealed in 1828. In 1829 
the Catholic Emancipation Act, which al- 
lowed Roman Catholics to sit in Parliament, 
was passed. Both parties then prepared for 
the great issue of parliamentary reform. 

At that time the House of Commons did 
not represent the nation but the aristocracy. 
Great landowners sent their sons and depend- 
ents to sit for pocket boroughs. Members 
sat for constituencies which had been estab- 
lished hundreds of years and more ; in the 
mean time some old towns had dwindled to 
villages. Old Sarum had no inhabitants, 
yet it returned two members. Old villages 
had grown to great cities, and had no repre- 
sentation. Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, 
Sheffield, returned no members ; Edinburgh, 
Glasgow, London itself, were most imper- 
fectly represented. The House represented 
neither population nor property. The pros- 



164 MACAULAY 

perous middle classes throughout the whole 
island determined that this injustice should 
cease, that they should share with the aris- 
tocracy. The Whigs were on the lookout for 
young men of talents. In the early part of 
1830, through the influence of Lord Lans- 
downe, Macaulay was returned to Parlia- 
ment for a petty borough. In July George 
IY. died, and Parliament was dissolved. The 
new elections were held on the issue of par- 
liamentary reform ; the Whigs were success- 
ful. Shortly after Parliament assembled the 
Duke of Wellington was forced to resign, 
and Earl Grey formed a Whig ministry. 
Brougham was made lord chancellor. On 
the first day of March, 1831, Lord John 
Kussell, leader in the House, introduced the 
Eeform Bill, which proposed to disfranchise 
some threescore boroughs, and to give repre- 
sentation to unrepresented towns. The next 
day Macaulay, who had addressed the House 
but twice in the preceding Parliament, arose 
and delivered his first great speech. He 
said that the bill was a practical measure, 
that it did not propose to embody a symmet- 
rical theory of representation ; he would not 
urge universal suffrage for fear lest in times 



MACAULAY 165 

of discontent the laboring classes should be 
wrought upon by passion to do hurt to the 
state ; but this bill would bring great strength 
of property and intelligence to the support 
of order. He argued that to say the present 
system was ancient, and in old times had 
been praised by Englishmen and foreigners, 
was no defense of it ; in those times there 
had been a representative House of Commons, 
but great changes in population and property 
had taken place ; that the Tory argument 
that Manchester was virtually represented was 
a concession to reform, for if virtual repre- 
sentation was good, in what respect was it 
good wherein direct representation would not 
be better ; that, to the fear that the middle 
classes were desirous of abolishing the mon- 
archy and the aristocracy, he would answer 
that a form of government in which the 
middle classes had no confidence could not 
conduce to the happiness of the people ; that, 
as to the claim that it would be unjust to 
deprive boroughs of vested rights, history 
showed that the right to return members 
had never been regarded as property ; that 
change was better than discontent. Did the 
House wish to wait for popular rage ? " Now, 



166 MACAULAY 

therefore, while everything at home and 
abroad forebodes ruin to those who persist 
in a hopeless struggle against the spirit of 
the age, now, while the crash of the proud- 
est throne of the Continent is still resound- 
ing in our ears, now, while the roof of a 
British palace affords an ignominious shelter 
to the exiled heir of forty kings, now, while 
we see on every side ancient institutions sub- 
verted, and great societies dissolved, now, 
while the heart of England is still sound, 
now, while old feelings and old associations 
retain a power and a charm which may too 
soon pass away, now, in this your accepted 
time, now, in this your day of salvation, 
take counsel, not of prejudice, not of party- 
spirit, not of the ignominious pride of a fatal 
consistency, but of history, of reason, of the 
ages which are past, of the signs of this most 
portentous time. Renew the youth of the 
state. Save property divided against itself. 
Save the multitude endangered by its own 
ungovernable passions. Save the aristocracy, 
endangered by its own unpopular power. 
Save the greatest, and fairest, and most 
highly civilized community that ever existed, 
from calamities which may in a few days 



MACAULAY 167 

sweep away all the rich heritage of so many- 
ages of wisdom and glory. The danger is 
terrible. The time is short.' ' The House 
was wild with excitement. Everybody com- 
pared him to Burke, Fox, Canning. Peel 
said that parts of the speech were as beau- 
tiful as anything he had ever heard or read. 
Macaulay, the orator, had rivaled Macaulay 
of the " Edinburgh Review." Society ran 
after him. Rogers gave him breakfast par- 
ties ; Lady Holland made a pet of him. 
Gladstone says that Macaulay had achieved 
" immense distinction." " For a century and 
more, perhaps no man in this country, with 
the exception of Mr. Pitt and Lord Byron, 
had attained at thirty-two the fame of Ma- 
caulay. His parliamentary success and his 
literary eminence were each of them enough, 
as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any 
brain and heart of a meaner order. But to 
these was added in his case an amount and 
quality of social attentions such as invaria- 
bly partake of adulation and idolatry, and 
as perhaps the high circles of London never 
before or since have lavished on a man whose 
claims lay only in himself, and not in his 
descent, his rank, or his possessions." Never- 



168 MACAULAY 

theless, Macaulay devoted himself to Parlia- 
ment. In the autumn the House of Lords 
threw out the bill. The country was very 
much excited. The Commons passed the bill 
again, the Lords indicated that their minds 
were unchanged. Earl Grey resigned. The 
Duke of Wellington tried to form a cabinet, 
but could not, and advised the king to recall 
the Whig ministry. The threat of creating 
new peers sufficient to turn the Lords to a 
Whig body was successful. The bill passed, 
and on the 7th of June, 1832, became law. 

The victory was much to the honor of 
England. By the force of public opinion 
expressed in the forms of law the fabric of 
the British constitution had been greatly 
changed. The chief of the coordinate 
branches of the government had been taken 
out of the hands of the aristocracy and given 
to the middle classes. Englishmen had 
effected this revolution by peaceful methods. 
No blood was shed, no soldiers paraded the 
streets, neither legal rights nor ordinary busi- 
ness was suspended ; while on the Continent 
in Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Po- 
land, reformers and conservatives had been 
shooting one another in the highways. 



MACAULAY 169 

These important events left their mark on 
Macaulay ; the natural bent of his shrewd 
practical mind was increased and strength- 
ened. He had deepened his likings and 
broadened his dislikes. He saw all English 
history explained and interpreted by this par- 
liamentary struggle. When his mind again 
went to the subject of his prize essay, he 
felt that the country had been through a 
revolution like that of 1688 ; and that his 
personal experience enabled him to under- 
stand James II. and William III. as no man 
who had not been in the middle of that 
struggle could do. It is no wonder that a 
young man of strong feelings, who had borne 
an honorable part in the contest, and had 
won a great reputation, should have become 
more and more convinced that the dividing 
line between Whig and Tory was the very 
line which separated right from wrong ; and 
that when he looked back over the history 
of England, he should have judged the past 
by the present. 



Macaulay' s collected essays fill several vol- 
umes. All but a few were published in the 



170 MACAULAY 

"Edinburgh Review" from 1825 to 1845. 
Of his first essay, that on Milton, he himself 
says it " contains scarcely a paragraph such 
as my matured judgment approves, and is 
overloaded with gaudy and ungraceful orna- 
ment." Howbeit, a gay livery becomes the 
opinions of youth. The essay on Milton is 
boyish, not with the ordinary immaturity of 
four and twenty, but with the boyishness of 
Macaulay's own schoolboy of twelve ; he who 
at fifteen in the Seminary of Douai learned 
enough theology to outweigh the Jesuit 
counselors of Charles II. and James II., and 
whose private library would be incomplete 
without a full edition of Burnet's pamphlets. 
Nevertheless, of all blame laid on Charles I., 
most people best remember the famous sum- 
ming up : " We charge him with having 
broken his coronation oath ; and we are told 
that he kept his marriage vow." The essay 
is boyish, but fifty years after it was pub- 
lished, Mr. Gladstone, at the age of sixty- 
five, deemed it worthy of criticism. 

In the essays many little mistakes of fact 
have been discovered by careful seekers. 
Froude charges Macaulay with error upon 
error : in that Macaulay makes accusation 



MACAULAY 171 

that Alice Perrers was mistress of Edward 
III., that Strafford debauched the daughter 
of Sir Richard Bolton, that Henry VIII. was 
the murderer of his wives. Froude's pleas 
of not guilty savor a little of the technical 
knowledge of an advocate at the criminal bar 
retained for the defense. Macaulay's state- 
ments may technically not be proved; as 
jurymen we may say not guilty, but as indi- 
viduals we are convinced of the justice of his 
charge. Froude, champion of the Protestant 
cause, accuses Macaulay of wrong to the Eng- 
lish Reformation and to Cranmer; and of 
espousal of the Catholic cause in 1829 ; but 
betrays his own intemperate partiality by 
adding : " The Ethiopian, it was said, had 
changed his skin." Froude also finds fault 
that Macaulay was too severe in his essay 
on Robert Montgomery's bad poems. What 
place has generosity in matters of art ? 

Froude says Macaulay "was the creation 
and representative of his own age ; what his 
own age said and felt, whether it was wise 
or foolish, Macaulay said and felt." In this 
judgment Mr. John Morley and Mr. Leslie 
Stephen concur. It may be that to be the 
representative of the age is no very serious 



172 MACAULAY 

fault. Shakespeare bears witness to the high 
renaissance of England ; Dante embodies the 
Middle Ages ; Cervantes represents the chiv- 
alry of Spain ; Abraham Lincoln is the flower 
of American democracy. Macaulay, it is 
true, never tires telling of the growth of pop- 
ulation and the increase of wealth; and many 
men whose minds, like his, are, as Froude 
says, "of an ordinary kind," think exactly 
as he does. But their creed is the creed of 
England. Is it surely wrong ? Perhaps we 
should rejoice at the increase of wisdom and 
not at multiplying numbers ; but what of an 
hundred thousand mothers who rejoice over 
an hundred thousand children ? Whose new- 
born son shall be handed to Herod as the 
price of wisdom ? And what becomes of the 
sneer at commercial prosperity when we think 
of food for the hungry, shelter for the ragged, 
schools for the ignorant, homes for the aged ? 
It is not the beliefs, but the skepticisms of 
the utilitarian which are to be blamed. 

It may be asked, is Froude's fame the tri- 
umph of accuracy ? is Mr. Morley wholly free 
from the popular positivist creed of his gener- 
ation ? has he in " Voltaire " and " Rousseau " 
betrayed sympathy with an alien faith ? Is 



MACAULAY 173 

Mr. Leslie Stephen in danger lest he be flung 
from the saddle of common sense by the 
caracoling of his rhetoric? They all com- 
plain that Macaulay lacks sensitiveness. The 
complaint is just ; but are they in a position 
to claim that their own title to distinction is 
" d'avoir quelquefois pleure " ? 

Macaulay' s essays taken one by one can 
be splintered and chipped, but bound to- 
gether they furnish part of the strength of 
English literature. Their subjects have great 
range of historical interest ; vast knowledge 
of literature has been crammed into their 
compass ; mastery of rhetoric colors page, 
paragraph, and sentence. Picture follows 
picture till the reader fancies that he is 
whirled by spring floods from Shalott cas- 
tle down to many towered Camelot. Like 
a genie to the lord of his lamp, Macaulay 
fetches the wealth of all the literature of the 
civilized world and lays it before his readers. 
He goes through a volume for an anecdote ; 
he ransacks a library for an impression. 

There is one danger into which Macaulay's 
critics often fall. In the picture of a man, 
in the narration of an episode, they find an 
error of fact, and conclude that the picture 



174 MACAULAY 

is unjust, that the episode is false. But 
Maeaulay is so steeped in information that, 
although he may be wrong as to a particular 
fact, he is justified in his conclusion. In the 
case of Henry VIII. there may be legal error 
and moral truth in the epithet murderer. 

The essays are the work of a rhetorician, 
the greatest, perhaps, in English literature. 
One defect in that literature, as compared with 
Latin literatures, has been a lack of rhetoric. 
The great masters of English prose, Milton 
and Burke, appeal to the imagination. Their 
language is sensuous and adorned, but they 
address themselves to the intellect ; they 
charge their speech with thought ; they are 
careless that they lay burdens upon their read- 
ers ; they are indifferent that they outstride 
the crowd. The rhetorician — a Cicero, a 
Bossuet — tries to spare his readers ; he 
wishes to be always thronged by the multi- 
tude. So it is with Maeaulay. He says 
nothing that everybody cannot comprehend 
and at once. He exerts all his powers to 
give his readers as little to do as possible ; 
he drains his memory to find decorations to 
catch their eye and fix their attention. He 
presents everything in brilliant images. He 



MACAULAY 175 

writes to the eye and the ear. He has in 
mind the ordinary Briton ; he does not write 
for a sect nor for a band of disciples. He 
is always the orator talking to men who are 
going to vote at the close of his speech. He 
never stops with a suggestion ; he never 
pauses with a hint; he is never tentative, 
never is rendered august by the clouds of 
doubt. 

Macaulay was a born orator fit to speak to 
the multitude at the cross-roads ; not to the 
individual in his closet : he was also a man 
of letters, a man of the library ; no living 
being ever had such a mass of information 
in his head at one time. These two qualities 
explain his devotion to literature, his admira- 
tion of the Greeks, his love of the world's 
great poets, and the seemingly inconsistent 
fact that he never exceeded the stature of a 
rhetorician. He had a skilled, delicate, and 
educated taste in literature ; but his ear to 
listen and his voice to speak were far apart. 
His ear is the cunning ear of Jacob listening 
to the sweet voice of Rachel, but his voice 
is the voice of Esau calling afar to his shep- 
herds. 

Macaulay's poetry is himself set to metre 



176 MACAULAY 

and rhyme. It has the swing, the vigor, the 
balanced sentences of his prose. It has the 
awakening power of brass instruments play- 
ing the reveille. It used to be a subject 
of debate whether Macaulay' s poems were 
poetry or no ; and there are men to whom 
those poems have not and never can have 
the significance of the poetry native to them. 
But they are the poetry of a strong, healthy, 
typical Englishman. It may be doubted if 
there be any other English poetry which 
bears in itself half so much evidence that it 
was written by an Englishman. The metre 
is good, the rhyme is good, the narrative is 
excellent. Everybody knows how the strenu- 
ous rush of Horatius dints itself on the mem- 
ory ; everybody can name the cities which 
sent their tale of men to Lars Porsena. 

Macaulay in his verse as in his prose pre- 
sents one definite picture after another. Each 
character comes on the stage in exact por- 
traiture, whether it be Horatius, Herminius, 
Halifax, Sunderland, or Somers. There they 
are in the blaze of high noon ; there is no 
twilight for them; never do their outlines 
blend in the shades of doubt. Macaulay saw 
the world as one vast picture-book. This 



MACAULAY 177 

is the reason why his essays stand on the 
Australian's shelf next to the Bible and to 
Shakespeare. There is nothing in English 
literature comparable to them ; there is no- 
thing of the kind in foreign literatures. 
Each essay is a combination of history and 
literature, of anecdote and learning, of inci- 
dent and portraiture, of advocacy and party 
spirit, such as are commonly found separate 
and distinct in the essays of a dozen differ- 
ent men. There is somewhat of the con- 
structive element of imagination here. As 
the mechanical mind brings together the 
odds and ends of its recollection, the re- 
mainder baggage of its memory, and works 
and fashions them into an invention, so 
Macaulay from his vast stores unites and 
combines scattered materials and creates an 
imaginative picture. There is nothing to be 
found in his work which the world did not 
possess before ; but most of the world was 
not aware of its possessions until Macaulay 
gathered them together. 

VI 

Next in importance to Macaulay's expe- 
rience in Parliament, as bearing upon his 



178 MACAULAY 

historical education, are his four years of 
service in India. One of the early acts of 
the Reformed Parliament was to revise the 
charter of the East India Company. Among 
great changes it was enacted that one mem- 
ber of the Supreme Council, which, with 
the governor-general, was to govern India, 
should not be chosen from the service of the 
company. Macaulay was appointed to fill 
that position, and in 1834, taking his sister 
Hannah, subsequently Lady Trevelyan, he 
sailed for India. To the general reader the 
most interesting event connected with Ma- 
caulay's service in India is a list of the books 
he read on the voyages thither and back. 
On the voyage out, he read the Iliad, the 
Odyssey, the iEneid, Horace, Caesar, Bacon, 
Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, 
"The Decline and Fall of Rome," Mill's 
" India," seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sis- 
mondi's " History of France," and the seven 
f olios of the " Biographica Britannica." The 
real matters of consequence are Macaulay' s 
study of the details of Indian administra- 
tion, his support of complete freedom of the 
press, his successful advocacy that all the 
higher branches of knowledge should be 



MACAULAY 179 

taught in the English tongue; and, more 
than all, his labors upon the Criminal Code. 
Of his draft of this Code after spending 
great and continuous labor upon it, Macau- 
lay says : " I am not ashamed to acknow- 
ledge that there are several chapters in the 
Code on which I have been employed for 
months ; of which I have changed the whole 
plan ten or twelve times ; which contain not 
a single word as it originally stood; and 
with which I am very far indeed from being 
satisfied." After Macaulay's return to Eng- 
land, in 1838, his draft was revised by a suc- 
cessor, and was finally enacted into law after 
the Mutiny. 

In those four years Macaulay took a large 
share in the administration of an empire ; 
while tending its needs he observed the 
operations of social forces which when past 
constitute the history of a country. In 
his leisure time he read books as no man 
ever read before. When he returned to 
England he had had the worst and the best 
training for writing history that ever an 
Englishman had : in that he had been a 
partisan legislator at a time when the en- 
actment of a British statute was the formal 



180 MACAULAY 

acknowledgment of a social revolution; and 
in that he had been administrator of the em- 
pire of India in a time of transition. These 
experiences gave him an intimate knowledge 
of the machinery of government ; but some- 
times in matters of history the hand of little 
employment hath the daintier sense. When 
we consider that in addition to this education 
he had a marvelous power of expression, a 
prodigious memory, and an interest in Eng- 
lish history greater than in anything else, 
it might have been guessed that Macaulay 
would write the most brilliant history of 
England that had yet been written. 

On July 20, 1838, Macaulay, writing to 
Napier, editor of the " Edinburgh Review," 
of his proposed History, said that according 
to his plan it should extend from the Revo- 
lution to the death of George IV. ; " the 
history would then be an entire view of all 
the transactions which took place between 
the Revolution which brought the Crown 
into harmony with the Parliament and the 
Revolution which brought the Parliament 
into harmony with the nation." On Decem- 
ber 18 his diary reads: "I am more and 
more in love with my subject. I really 



MACAULAY 181 

think that posterity will not willingly let my 
book die." Nevertheless, it was long before 
he was able to give himself wholly to his 
task. In the summer of that year he was 
asked to stand for the city of Edinburgh. 
On his election he accepted the secretary- 
ship at war and a seat in Lord Melbourne's 
cabinet. The Whigs, however, were losing 
their hold upon the people, and in the gen- 
eral election in 1841, although Macaulay was 
returned again from Edinburgh, the Tories 
carried everything south of the Trent, and 
Macaulay lost his seat in the cabinet. He 
was glad of greater leisure, and went busily 
to work at essays, at his " Lays of Ancient 
Rome," and at his History. 

Once again he sat in the cabinet. Sir 
Robert Peel was beaten in June, 1846, and 
Lord John Russell gave Macaulay a seat as 
paymaster-general of the army. But his 
term of office was again short, for he was 
defeated at the polls in the next general 
election in 1847. 

Free from parliamentary duties Macaulay 
worked at his History with unimpeded indus- 
try; he devoured books, pamphlets, manu- 
scripts, papers, letters; he traveled hither 



182 MACAULAY 

and thither, to this place and to that; he 
followed lines of march, he traced marks of 
old walls and bastions, he ferreted out tradi- 
tions, he listened to old gossip. " The notes 
made during his fortnight's tour through 
the scenes of the Irish war are equal in 
bulk to a first-class article in the Edinburgh 
or Quarterly reviews." The first two vol- 
umes of the History appeared in November, 
1848. Success was instantaneous. Macau- 
lay had said : "I shall not be satisfied unless 
I produce something which shall for a few 
days supersede the last fashionable novel on 
the tables of young ladies." He must have 
been satisfied. Edition has succeeded edi- 
tion, paid for and pirated, in England, in 
America, in a dozen foreign countries, vol- 
umes upon volumes, until it may be doubted 
if any book, except the Bible, has had so 
many copies printed. In December, 1855, 
the third and fourth volumes were pub- 
lished ; and Macaulay's fame as one of the 
great English writers of the nineteenth cen- 
tury was firmly fixed in English literature. 
" All the world wondered ; " most of the 
world applauded. Yet on the day when his 
first volumes came out he writes in his diary : 



MACAULAY 183 

" I read my book, and Thucydides, which, I 
am sorry to say, I found much better than 
mine." In comparison with any other rivals 
he felt content; and as he was free from 
petty vanity, his opinion is entitled to re- 
spect. In heaped masses of detail, in bril- 
liant narrative, in clearness of meaning, in 
striking portraiture, in the portrayal of the 
chief characteristics of the English character, 
Macaulay has no English rival. 

vn 

It would be easy to find fault with any 
story of past events, even if it were written 
by Minos and Rhadamanthus together. The 
historian must tell in a chapter the events 
of years ; he must compress into a page the 
character of a hero ; he must cram into a 
paragraph an episode which brought life or 
death to a thousand men. With innumera- 
ble facts to choose from, he is bound to make 
choice. By the law of individuality he will 
not choose just the facts that Tom, Dick, or 
Harry sets store by. That Stubbs, Freeman, 
Hallam, Gardiner, do not have as many fault- 
finders as Macaulay is due in a measure, 
at least, to the fact that they have not one 



184 MACAULAY 

fiftieth part of his readers ; and the readers 
whom they have belong to certain general 
classes. Macaulay's readers are of every 
kind and description : of crabbed age and 
fiery youth ; grave seniors, reckless ne'er-do- 
wells ; obstinate men, reasonable men ; chol- 
eric men, meek men ; pinched men, pampered 
men ; misers, prodigals ; saints, sinners ; cyn- 
ics, believers ; the melancholy man, the curi- 
ous man, the mean man, the envious man, — 
all kinds from Brabantio to Autolycus, from 
Major Pendennis to Mr. Winkle ; and every 
one a critic, caring not who knows his mind. 
There are, however, several classes of men 
to whom Macaulay's History wears an essen- 
tially false aspect. These are, first, the men 
of Tory cast of thought, of whom we have 
spoken : men who have been taught from 
babyhood to look upon the cause represented 
by Tories in the history of politics as the 
only true and just cause ; men who sit at 
ease in the status quo and wonder why other 
men squirm in their seats ; men whose minds 
clinging to the past, — 

" Sois-moi fiddle, 6 pauvre habit que j'aime ! " 

look askance at the future and possible 



MACAULAY 185 

change ; who face to-morrow in the posture 
of self-defense. They judge by local custom 
and immemorial usage, "My father used to 
say that his grandfather said/' and cross 
themselves. Naturally they look upon the 
liberal type with an unjust eye. 

In the second place, there are men of re- 
ligious nature : men who give as little ear 
to daily happenings as they do to unknown 
tongues ; who care not for the reputed mean- 
ing of things; who read Plato, Spinoza, 
Wordsworth ; who roam about seeking some- 
thing that shall satisfy their sense of bigness ; 
who plunge into learning, bigotry, or sacri- 
fice, as headlong as a boy dives into a sum- 
mer pool. These men cannot take the Whig 
interpretation of life. Macaulay's facts are 
to them incoherent, meaningless ; he might 
as well hold out to them a handful of 
sand. What are those gay faceted little facts 
to them? What care they for machinery, 
parliamentary reform, progress, Manchester 
prints? They delight not in gaudy day; 
they are servants to darkness, — 

"Hail thou most sacred venerable thing." 

Then there is a third class of men suscepti- 



186 MACAULAY 

ble to delicate and indefinite sensations. They 
demand chiaroscuro, twilight, " shadows and 
sunny glimmerings." They are of a sensi- 
tive, skeptical quality. They hold that the 
meaning of one solitary fact cannot be ex- 
hausted by the most brilliant description; 
they must needs go back to it continually, 
like Claude Monet to his haystack ; every 
time they find it different. They five in 
mystery and uncertainty. The past is to 
them as doubtful as the future. For them 
some infinite spirit hovers over life, contin- 
ually endowing it with its own attribute of 
infinite change, forever wreathing this misty 
matter into new shapes; making all things 
uncommon, wonderful, and strange. For 
them the highest of man's nature is in his 
shudder of awe. For them all life has fitful 
elements of poetry, music, and art. They 
are sensitive to little things, moving about 
like children in a world unrealized. They 
are sympathetic with seeming mutually exclu- 
sive things. Such men seek poetry every- 
where, and find it ; they contemplate life as 
an aggregate of possibilities, not of facts. At 
common happenings, like opium-eaters, they 
fall into strange dreams. They live on sym- 



MACAULAT 187 

bols. To such an aspect of life as these men 
behold, Macaulay was utterly strange. Of a 
chapel in Marseilles he says : " The mass was 
nearly over. I stayed to the end, wondering 
that so many reasonable beings could come 
together to see a man bow, drink, bow again, 
wipe a cup, wrap up a napkin, spread his 
arms, and gesticulate with his hands ; and to 
hear a low muttering which they could not 
understand, interrupted by the occasional 
jingling of a bell." 

Macaulay seems to have felt his estrange- 
ment in a childlike way whenever he had to 
do with those matters of beauty which pecu- 
liarly call out the distinctive character of 
this class of men. "I have written several 
things on historical, political, and moral 
questions, of which, on the fullest recon- 
sideration, I am not ashamed, and by which 
I should be willing to be estimated ; but I 
have never written a page of criticism on 
poetry, or the fine arts, which I would not 
burn if I had the power." And yet Macau- 
lay had strong feelings for two great ideal- 
ists of the world, Dante and Cervantes. In 
Florence his rooms looked out on a court 
adorned with orange trees and marble stat- 



188 MACAULAY 

ues. His diary reads : " I never look at the 
statues without thinking of poor Mignon : — 

" ' Und Marrnorbilder stehn und sehn mich an : 
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan ? ' 

I know no two lines in the world which I 
would sooner have written than those." In 
another part of his diary he writes : " I 
walked far into Herefordshire, and read, 
while walking, the last five books of the 
Iliad, with deep interest and many tears. I 
was afraid to be seen crying by the parties 
of walkers that met me as I came back ; cry- 
ing for Achilles cutting off his hair, crying 
for Priam rolling on the ground in the court- 
yard of his house ; mere imaginary beings, 
creatures of an old ballad-maker who died 
near three thousand years ago/' To such 
sentiments few have been as susceptible as 
Macaulay, but beyond that into the realm of 
spiritual sensitiveness, into the borderland 
where the senses cease to tyrannize, he could 
not go. 

Then there are men of individual idiosyn- 
crasies : one does not like the popularity of 
Macaulay's History, he prefers that which is 
caviare to the general, a privacy of glorious 
light must be his ; a second is troubled by 



MACAULAY 189 

antitheses and rhetoric ; a third, hazy with 
old saws, thinks that in so much glitter there 
can be no gold ; a fourth wants humor, he 
misses the " tender blossoming " of Charles 
Lamb here and there; others are Quakers 
zealous for William Penn ; doctors of philo- 
sophy tender of Bacon's good name ; grand- 
sons of Scotch cavaliers warm for Dundee ; 
militiamen valiant for Marlborough ; then 
there are Mr. Churchill Babington, Sir Fran- 
cis Palgrave, and Gladstone himself, defend- 
ers of the Anglican Church, and, not least, 
Macaulay's fellow historians. How can a 
just man please men of such varying hu- 
mors ? How shall a man write history for a 
fellow scholar ? How hold the balances be- 
tween yesterday and to-morrow ? How can 
a man be neither for the party of change 
nor for the party that says " tarry awhile." 
" C'est une plaisante imagination de conce- 
voir un esprit balance justement entre deux 
pareilles envyes." 

Macaulay's History suits the majority of 
Englishmen, by its virile directness, its hon- 
est clearness, its bold definiteness. Macau- 
lay is never afraid ; he never shirks, he never 
dissembles or cloaks; he never says "per- 



190 MACAULAY 

haps " or " maybe/' nor " the facts are ob- 
scure/' nor " authorities differ." He makes 
the reader know just what effect the evidence 
has produced on his mind. To be sure, 
there is danger in that brilliant rhetoric. 
The glow of declamation disdains the sickly 
hue of circumspection. The reader of the 
year 3000, for whom Macaulay winds his 
horn, cannot hear the shuffling syllables of 
shambling uncertainties. Men go to the 
window when a fire engine gallops through 
the street; a gentler summons might not 
fetch them. There is something of martial 
music about Macaulay's prose. There is that 
in it which excites a man. It belongs to a 
great advocate, not to blindfolded Justice 
holding her cautious scales and doling out 
"ifs," "buts," "howevers," as she balances 
probabilities with all the diffidence of Doubt. 
But what is truth? Shall Pilate tell of his 
administration in Judsea ? If he do, will it 
be as definitive as the Koran in the eyes of 
the Caliph Omar? Will Pilate leave the 
Evangelists superfluous ? 



MACAULAY 191 

VIII 

Macaulay was essentially, and in his strong- 
est characteristics, an Englishman. His mind 
and heart were cast in English moulds. His 
great love and unbounded admiration of Eng- 
land sprung from his inner being. His 
morality, his honesty, his hate of sham, his 
carelessness of metaphysics, his frank speech, 
his insular understanding, his positiveness, 
are profoundly English. And there is in 
him something of that tenderness — to which 
in public he could give no adequate expres- 
sion — which gives its grace to that most 
honorable epithet, an English gentleman. 
The real English gentleman shows his qual- 
ity in his English home. Trevelyan has done 
as much for admiration of Macaulay, as ora- 
tory, essays, poetry, and history have, by giv- 
ing us Macaulay's letters, and by telling us 
of Macaulay at home. 

It would be a far cry to another man who 
has poured forth so much prodigal affec- 
tion upon his sisters and their children. A 
Raleigh, a Bayard, do their famous acts of 
courtesy to sovereigns in presence of a court ; 
Macaulay did his acts of chivalry in secret. 



192 MACAULAY 

With patience, pain, and tender solicitude, 
he spent his splendid gifts for the pleasure 
of simple women, and of boys and girls. 
In his youth he was the delight of his sis- 
ters; in his manhood he was their pride, 
their joy, and their benefactor. In all his 
brilliant story, his letters to his sister Han- 
nah, his little acts of kindness, his relations 
to his nephews and nieces, are the most in- 
teresting passages. 

In the midst of his triumph after his great 
speech on the Eef orm Bill, he writes from 
London : " My dear Sister, — I cannot tell 
you how delighted I am to find that my let- 
ters amuse you. Send me some gossip, my 
love. Tell me how you go on with German. 
What novel have you commenced ? or rather, 
how many dozen have you finished? Ke- 
commend me one." While he was in India 
he wrote, on the death of his youngest sis- 
ter, " What she was to me no words can ex- 
press. I will not say that she was dearer to 
me than anything in the world, for my sister 
who was with me was equally dear ; but she 
was as dear to me as one human being can 
be to another." In a late diary he writes : 
" Margaret, alas ! alas ! And yet she might 



MACAULAY 193 

have changed to me. But no ; that could 
never have been. To think that she has 
been near twenty-two years dead ; and I am 
crying for her as if it were yesterday." 

He was a great playmate with Lady Tre- 
velyan's little girls. He romped with them ; 
made poems for them, wrote them doggerel 
verses and jolly letters. " Michaelmas will, 
I hope, find us all at Clapham over a noble 
goose. Do you remember the beautiful 
Puseyite hymn on Michaelmas day ? It is a 
great favorite with all Tractarians. You and 
Alice should learn it. It begins : — 

1 Though Quakers scowl, though Baptists howl, 

Though Plymouth Brethren rage, 
We Churchmen gay will wallow to-day 
In apple-sauce, onions, and sage. 

' Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork, 

And have the bottle handy ; 
For each slice of goose will introduce 
A thimbleful of brandy.* 

Is it not good ? I wonder who the author 
can be. Not Newman, I think. It is above 
him. Perhaps it is Bishop Wilberforce." 
From his home at Holly Lodge at Kensing- 
ton he writes to his youngest niece : " I have 
had no friends near me but my books and 



194 MACAULAY 

my flowers, and no enemies but those exe- 
crable dandelions. I thought that I was rid 
of the villains ; but the day before yesterday, 
when I got up and looked out of my win- 
dow, I could see five or six of their great, 
impudent, flaring, yellow faces turned up at 
me. * Only you wait till I come down,' I 
said. Is it Christian-like to hate a dandelion 
so savagely?" He writes in his diary at 
Florence that he saw in the cloister at Santa 
Croce " a monument to a little baby, ' II piu 
bel bambino che mai fosse ; ' not a very wise 
inscription for parents to put up, but it 
brought tears into my eyes. I thought of 
the little thing (a baby niece) who lies in the 
cemetery at Calcutta." 

The end of his life was full of honors ; 
the city of Edinburgh returned him to Parlia- 
ment unsolicited, eager to repair the wrong 
she had done in rejecting him ; Lord Pal- 
merston's government made him a peer. In 
1858 Motley writes : " It is always delightful 
to meet Macaulay, and to see the reverence 
with which he is regarded by everybody." 
He died on December 28, 1859. On Macau- 
lay's tombstone in Westminster Abbey are the 
words : — 



MACAULAY 195 

"His body lies buried in peace, 
But his name liveth forever more." 

And since Trevelyan's book not his name 
only, but the manner of man that he was. 
Of the very best type of Englishman, of the 
very straitest sect of Whigs in all except his 
brilliancy, there, in his biography he stands, 
in his courage, his convictions, his honesty, 
his nobility, his tenderness. Others may de- 
nounce shams and preach against affectation ; 
Macaulay's whole life was one eulogy upon 
plain speech, one continued freedom from 
make-believe. He never was a pretender. 
In India, in the midst of awful beliefs, of 
strange ceremonies, of notions that lie out- 
side our own humanity, where intensity of 
life is not admired, where force is incuri- 
ously regarded, where fame and honor are 
not the lessons of children, where chastity is 
not the pride of woman nor possessions the 
distinction of man, where sensuous flowers 
exhale perfumes that would wither up " wee 
modest " English flowers, Macaulay made no 
pretense of appreciation, but worked at a 
Criminal Code, and read European classics as 
if he were in Shropshire. 

In Italy he is ready to burst into tears 



196 MACAULAY 

when he has crossed the portal of St. Peter's ; 
but for him " nobody can think Saint Mark's 
beautiful." He is shocked and disgusted by 
" the monstrous absurdity of bringing doges, 
archangels, cardinals, apostles, persons of the 
Trinity, and members of the Council of Ten 
into one composition." 

In England all that Newman, Carlyle, Rus- 
kin stood for, passed by him as unheeded as 
a " threshold brook." 

Macaulay's fame as a man of letters seems 
as secure as that of any Englishman of this 
century. Editions of the Essays and History 
still come on. In Germany there are numer- 
ous translations. In France Taine has said : 
" The great novelists penetrate the soul of 
their characters, assume their feelings, ideas, 
language. Such was Balzac. . . . With a 
different talent Macaulay has the same power. 
An incomparable advocate, he pleads an in- 
finite number of causes ; and he is master of 
each cause, as fully as his client. Though 
English, he had the spirit of harmony." In 
Italy Professor Villari cites his opinion upon 
Macchiavelli, delivered when he was twenty- 
six, as of the greatest authority. In the 
United States his books have been pirated, 



MACAULAY 197 

and his style imitated. The generation of 
the year 2000 no doubt will read him. As 
to them of 3000, who cares ? Many men 
greater than he are likely to be born, before 
another of such peculiar gifts who shall 
embody so brilliantly the best English char- 
acteristics. 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 



The French have had hospitable reception 
from us of late years ; their books have been 
read with diligence, their novels have strewn 
ladies' tables, their ideas have inspired our 
men of letters. " Englished," " done into 
English," translated, converted, transfused 
into English, French literature furnishes 
forth our young ladies with conversation and 
our young gentlemen with cosmopolitanism, 
until the crushed worm of national preju- 
dice begins . to squirm and turn. Flaubert 
the high aspiring, Maupassant the cunning 
craftsman, Bourget the puppet-shifter, Zola 
the zealot, have had their innings ; their side 
is out ; the fiery bowling of Mr. Kipling has 
taken their last wicket, and those of us who 
have been born and bred in prejudice and 
provincialism may return to our English- 
American ways with a fair measure of jaun- 
tiness. We are no longer ashamed to lose 



202 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

interest when we hear of an "inevitable" 
catastrophe or of an "impeccable" style; we 
yawn openly over " bitterly modern spiritual 
complexities." Let us have done with raw 
admiration of foreigners; let us no more 
heed Ibsen and Zola, 

" Or what the Norse intends, or what the French." 

Let us speak out our prejudices ; let us un- 
cover our honest thoughts and our real affec- 
tions. Let us openly like what nature has 
commanded us to like, and not what we 
should were we colossi spanning the chasm 
between nations. 

Cosmopolitanism spreads out its syllables 
as if it were the royal city of humanity, but 
if, whenever its praises are sung, the context 
be regarded, the term is found to be only a 
polysyllabic equivalent for Paris and things 
Parisian ; it means preference of French 
ideas and ways to English. We are not 
cosmopolitan ; we learned our French history 
from Shakespeare, Marryat, and Punch, and 
from a like vantage-ground of literary sim- 
plicity we survey the courses of English and 
French literatures, and with the definiteness 
of the unskeptical we believe that in novel 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 203 

and story, in drama and epic, in sermon and 
essay, in ballad and song, the English have 
overmatched the French. 

The heart of all literature is poetry. The 
vitality of play, story, sermon, essay, of 
whatever there is best in prose, is the poetic 
essence in it. English prose is better than 
French prose, because of the poetry in it. 
We do not mean prose as a vehicle for use- 
ful information, but prose put to use in 
literature. English prose gets emotional ca- 
pacity from English poetry, not only from 
the spirit of it, but also by adopting its 
words. English prose has thus a great po- 
etical vocabulary open to it, and a large and 
generous freedom from conventional gram- 
mar. It draws its nourishment from English 
blank verse, and thus strengthened strides 
onward like a bridegroom. If you are a 
physician inditing a prescription, or a lawyer 
drawing a will, or a civil engineer putting 
down logarithmic matter, write in French 
prose : your patient will die, his testament 
be sustained, or an Eiffel Tower be erected 
to his memory in the correctest and clearest 
manner possible. But when you write a 
prayer, or exhort a forlorn hope, or put into 



204 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

words any of those emotions that give life 
its dignity, let your speech be English, that 
your reader shall feel emotional elevation, his 
heart lifted up within him, while his intellect 
peers at what is beyond his reach. 

If a man admits that for him poetry is the 
chief part of literature, he must concede that 
French prose cannot awaken in him those 
feelings which he has on reading the English 
Bible, Milton, Ruskin, Carlyle, or Emerson. 
It is the alliance of our prose with our poetry 
that makes it so noble. What English-speak- 
ing person in his heart thinks that any 
French poet is worthy to loose one shoe- 
latchet in the poets' corner of English shoes? 

" The man that loves another 

As much as his mother tongue, 
Can either have had no mother, 

Or that mother no mother's tongue." 

We have shown too much deference to this 
inmate of clubs and weekly newspapers, this 
international Frankenstein of literary cosmo- 
politanism. English poetry is the greatest 
achievement in the world ; we think so, why 
then do we make broad our phylacteries and 
say that we do not? Ben Jonson says, "There 
is a necessity that all men should love their 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 205 

country ; he that professeth the contrary 
may be delighted with his words, but his 
heart is not there." But we here concern 
ourselves with another matter. We desire 
to praise the two chief qualities that have 
combined to make English literature so great : 
they are common sense and audacity, and 
their combined work is commonly called, for 
lack of a better name, romance. 

Younger brother to English poetry is Eng- 
lish romance, which of all strange things in 
this world is most to be wondered at. Brother 
to poetry, cousin to greed, neighbor to ideal- 
ism, friend to curiosity, English romance in 
deed and word is the riches of the English 
race. Its heroes march down the rolls of 
history like a procession of kings : Raleigh 
and Spenser, Drake and Sidney, Bunyan and 
Harry Vane, Hastings and Burns, Nelson 
and Sir Walter Scott, Gordon and Kipling. 
Strange as English romance is, if a man 
would learn its two constituent qualities in 
little space, he need only take from the 
library shelf " The Principal Navigations, 
Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the 
English Nation, made by Sea or Overland," 
compiled by Richard Hakluyt, Preacher. 



206 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

Here we perceive the bond between romance, 
greed, idealism, and curiosity ; here we see 
how the British Empire plants its feet of 
clay upon the love of gain. Trade, trade, 
trade, with Eussians, Tartars, Turks, with 
Hindoos, Hottentots, and Bushmen, with 
Eskimo, Indian, and South Sea Islander ; 
and yet hand in hand with greed go curi- 
osity, love of adventure, and search for some 
ideal good. A wonderful people are the 
English so faithfully to serve both God and 
Mammon, and so sturdily to put their great 
qualities to building both an empire and a 

literature. 

II 

Who is not pricked by curiosity upon see- 
ing " certeine bookes of Cosmographie with 
an universalle Mappe " ? Who is not splen- 
didly content, of a winter evening, his ob- 
livious boots upon the fender, his elbows 
propped on the arms of his chair, to read 
Mr. Preacher Hakluyt's Voyages ? Who does 
not feel himself disposed " to wade on farther 
and farther in the sweet study of Cosmo- 
graphie"? Let us leave gallicized gallants, 
literary cosmopolites, their adherents and 
accomplices, and read old Hakluyt. 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 207 

What quicker can attune the reader's at- 
tention to the valiant explorations that are 
to follow than to read that " when the Em- 
perour's sister, the spouse of Spaine, with a 
Fleete of 130 sailes, stoutly and proudly- 
passed the narrow Seas, Lord William How- 
ard of Effingham, accompanied with ten 
ships onely of Her Majestie's Navie Roiall, 
environed their Fleete in most strange and 
warrelike sorte, enforced them to stoope gal- 
lant, and to vaile their bonets for the Queene 
of England " ! 

On the 9th of May, 1553, the ordinances 
of M. Sebastian Cabota, Esquier, Governour 
of the Mysterie and Companie of Marchants 
Adventurers, were all drawn up. The mer- 
chants aboard the ships were duly warned 
"in countenance not to shew much to desire 
the forren commodities ; nevertheless to take 
them as for friendship ; " and Sir Hugh Wil- 
loughby, Knight, Kichard Chancellor, their 
officers, mariners, and company, set sail down 
the Thames in the Edward Bonaventure, the 
Bona Speranza, and the Confidencia, on their 
way by the northeast passage to Cathay. 
Before they had gone far, Thomas Nash, 
cook's mate on the Bona Speranza, was 



208 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

ducked at the yard's-arm for pickerie. The 
ships sailed up the North Sea, past Scan- 
dinavia, and into the Arctic Ocean, where 
Sir Hugh Willoughby and his two ships 
were lost, but Chancellor entered the White 
Sea, and landed in Russia. He then drove 
on sledges to Moscow, where he was received 
most graciously by his Majesty Ivan the 
Terrible. Chancellor wrote a description of 
the Russians, in which he tells their ways 
and customs. Although Chancellor could 
remember very well the days of Henry VIII. 
and the seizure of church lands, yet he re- 
marks that when a rich Russian grows old 
" he shall be called before the Duke, and it 
shall be sayd unto him, Friend, you have 
too much living, and are unserviceable to 
your Prince, lesse will serve you, and the rest 
will serve other men that are more able to 
serve, whereupon immediately his living shall 
be taken away from him saving a little to 
find himself e and his wife on ; and he may 
not once repine thereat, but for answere he 
will say, that he hath nothing, but it is God's 
and the Duke's graces, and cannot say, as 
we the common people in England say, if 
wee have anything, that it is God's and our 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 209 

owne. Men may say that these men are in 
wonderful great awe and obedience, that 
thus one must give and grant his goods 
which he hath bene scraping and scratching 
for all his life, to be at his Prince's pleasure 
and commandement." 

Coming back from his second voyage, 
Chancellor brought an ambassador from Ivan 
Vasilivich, Emperour of all Kussia, Great 
Duke of Smolenski, Tuerskie, Yowgoriskie, 
Permskie, Viatskie, Bolgarskie and Sibierskie, 
Emperour of Chernigoskie, Rezanskie, Polod- 
skie, Rezewskie, Bielskie, Rostoskie, Yerasla- 
veskie, Bealozarskie, Oudarskie, Obdorskie, 
Condenskie, and manie other countries, to 
the most famous and excellent Princes Philip 
and Mary. (This patent inferiority of de- 
signation was the cause of much diplomatic 
correspondence.) Chancellor sailed out of 
the White Sea through the Arctic Ocean ; 
for the Russians had no access to the Baltic, 
as they had granted exclusive privileges to 
the Flemings. Storms overtook him on the 
Scottish coast : Chancellor and most of the 
men were drowned ; only " the noble person- 
age of the Ambassadour " was saved. 

In 1557 Master Anthonie Jenkinson in 



210 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

the Primerose, the Admirall, with three other 
tall ships, took this ambassador back to Rus- 
sia by the same northern way, seven hundred 
and fifty leagues. Jenkinson sailed up the 
river Dwina in a little boat, lodging in the 
wilderness by the riverside at night ; and " he 
that will travell those wayes, must carie with 
him an hatchet, a tinderboxe, and a kettle, 
to make fire and seethe meate, when he hath 
it ; for there is small succour in those parts, 
unless it be in townes." He was graciously 
received in Moscow by the Emperor about 
Christmas time, and witnessed the court cer- 
emonies. At their Twelphtide, the Emperor 
with his crown of Tartarian fashion upon 
his head, and the Metropolitan attended by 
divers bishops and nobles and a great con- 
course of people, went in long procession to 
the river, which was completely frozen over. 
A hole was cut in the ice, and the Metropoli- 
tan hallowed the water with great solemnity, 
and did cast of the water upon the Emper- 
or's son and upon the nobility. " That done, 
the people with great thronging filled pots of 
the said water to carie home to their houses, 
and divers children were throwen in, and 
sicke people, and plucked out quickly again, 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 211 

and divers Tartars christened. Also there 
were brought the Emperour's best horses to 
drink of the sayd hallowed water, and like- 
wise many other men brought their horses 
thither to drinke, and by that means they 
make their horses as holy as themselves." 

The English merchants were now well es- 
tablished in Muscovy, and sent home frequent 
reports about the manners and customs of 
Eussians. They noticed the Russian custom 
" every yere against Easter to die or colour 
red with Brazell a great number of egs ; the 
common people use to carie in their hands 
one of their red egs, not onely upon Easter 
day, but also three or foure days after, and 
gentlemen and gentlewomen have egs gilded 
which they cary in like maner. When two 
friends meete, the one of them sayth, the 
Lord is risen, the other answereth, it is so 
of a truth, and then they kisse and exchange 
their egs both men and women, continuing 
in kissing 4 dayes together." 

One of the agents of the company in Mos- 
cow, Master Henrie Lane, had a controversy 
with one Sheray Costromitskey concerning 
the amount of a debt due from the Eng- 
lish merchants. Lane proffered six hundred 



212 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

rubles, but the Russians demanded double the 
sum, and not agreeing they had recourse to 
law. For trial by combat Master Lane was 
provided with a strong, willing Englishman, 
one of the company's servants ; but the Rus- 
sian champion was not willing to meet him, 
and the case was brought to trial before two 
chief judges. The English party were taken 
within the bar, and their adversaries placed 
outside. " Both parties were first perswaded 
with great curtesie, to wit, I to enlarge mine 
offer, and the Russes to mitigate their chal- 
lenge. Notwithstanding that I protested my 
conscience to be cleere, and their gaine by 
accompt to bee sufficient, yet of gentlenes 
at the magistrate's request I make proffer 
of 100 robles more ; which was openly com- 
mended, but of the plaintifes not accepted. 
Then sentence passed with our names in two 
equall balles of waxe made and holden up by 
the Judges, their sleeves stripped up. Then 
with standing up and wishing well to the 
trueth attributed to him that should be first 
drawen, by both consents from among the 
multitude they called a tall gentleman, say- 
ing : Thou with such a coate or cap, come 
up : where roome with speede was made. He 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 213 

was commanded to hold his cappe (wherein 
they put the balles) by the crown, upright 
in sight, his arme not abasing. With like 
circumspection they called at adventure an- 
other tall gentleman, commanding him to 
strip up his right sleeve, and willed him with 
his bare arme to reach up, and in God's 
name severally to take out the two balles ; 
which he did delivering to either Judge one. 
Then with great admiration the lotte in ball 
first taken out was mine : which was by open 
sentence so pronounced before all the peo- 
ple, and to be the right and true parte. I 
was willed forthwith to pay the plaintif es the 
sum by me appointed. Out of which, for 
their wrong or sinne, as it was termed, they 
payd tenne in the hundred to the Emperour. 
Many dayes after, as their maner is, the peo- 
ple took our nation to be true and upright 
dealers, and talked of this judgement to our 
great credite." 

Thus, with daring, good sense, and good 
luck, English commerce laid the foundation 
stones of the English Empire. But the 
reader must read for himself how these mer- 
chants flew the English flag for the first 
time across the Caspian Sea, and made their 



214 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

way to Persia in the teeth of danger. Or 
if the reader would learn more of English 
courage, let him read that volume in which 
Ealeigh describes how Sir Richard Grenville 
fought the Revenge. 

We wish only to call attention to the 
union of boldness and prudence in these Eng- 
lish traders at the budding time of Eliza- 
bethan literature. 

Ill 

Commerce is like colonizing : it demands 
manly virtue, forethought, audacity, quick- 
ness to advance, slowness to yield ; it requires 
diplomacy, flattery, lies, and buffets. Mis- 
adventure may follow misadventure, yet the 
money-bags of England continue to propel 
new adventurers over the globe. Merchant 
adventurers do not seek Utopias, — let a man 
plan a Utopia, and the English cut his head 
off ; they seek a gay and gallant market, where 
black, red, or yellow men will barter taffeta 
and furs for English homespun, English glass, 
and English steel ; or, better yet, will give 
England a kingdom for "a cherry or a fig." 
The money-getting English are no misers. 
Their gold-bags breed audacity. Nobles of 
Devon, franklins of Kent, burghers of Lon- 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 215 

don, make many companies of merchant ad- 
venturers, and delight to risk their posses- 
sions for the sake of great returns. Half the 
famous ships that beat the Spanish Armada 
— the Bull, the Bear, the Dreadnaught, 
the Arkraleigfh — were built for the com- 
mercial enterprise of piracy on the Spanish 
Main. Elizabeth and her nobles drew their 
ten per centum per mensem from such in- 
vestments. 

Money searched for cheap routes to Ca- 
thay, and opened up trade with Russia, Tar- 
tary, and Persia. Hope of gain sent colonists 
westward to Virginia, lured by the descrip- 
tion of land " which will not onely serve the 
ordinary turnes of you which are and shall 
bee planters and inhabitants, but such an 
overplus sufficiently to be yielded, as by way 
of trafficke and exchaunge will enrich your- 
selves the providers, and greatly profit our 
owne countrymen." The swelling money- 
bags of England set Clive and Hastings over 
India, took the Cape of Good Hope, and 
sought twentyfold increase in Australia. 

English commerce is no headstrong fool. 
It looks first, and leaps afterward. Like a 
wary captain, it takes its reckoning by com- 



216 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

pass and sextant, and then spreads all sail. 
It acts with the self-confidence of common 
sense. Commerce is as prudent as Cecil and 
as bold as Drake ; but prudence is the con- 
trolling spirit. Common sense, also, is the 
characteristic of English literature which has 
exalted it so far beyond its modern rivals. 
Powerful as have been its fantastic, mon- 
strous, and metaphysical elements, disturbing 
as have been affectation and demagogy, these 
influences have been but little eddies whirling 
round in the strong, steady current of com- 
mon sense that has carried English literature 
on its flood. Common sense unconsciously 
recognizes that men are human ; that imagi- 
nation must play round the facts of daily 
life ; that poetry and prose must be wrought 
out of the dust of the earth, and not out of 
some heavenly essence. Common sense acts 
upon instant needs, and meets the dangers 
of the hour ; it is not diverted from its path 
by fears or allurements of the distant future ; 
it climbs like a child, clinging to one balus- 
ter and then another, till it plants its steps 
securely. There is a world of difference be- 
tween it and " une certaine habitude raison- 
nable qui est le propre de la race francaise en 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 217 

poesie," according to Sainte-Beuve. One is 
bred in the closet by meditation ; the other 
comes from living. 

The good sense of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 
Dryden, Defoe, Pope, Fielding, Walter Scott, 
Tennyson, George Eliot, and others walls in 
English literature, so that it can stand the 
push of unruly genius in a Marlowe or a 
Shelley. Against this dominating common 
sense allegory rises in vain ; passion cannot 
overtopple it ; too subtle thought is sloughed 
off by it ; dreams serve but to ornament ; de- 
sires are tamed ; parlor rhymesters are tossed 
aside. Common sense, with its trust in com- 
mon humanity, has made English literature. 
The same solid wisdom which makes Eng- 
lish money ballasts English verse and prose. 
There is an impress as of pounds, shillings, 
and pence on most of their pages ; not vul- 
gar and rude, as these words suggest, but 
like images on antique coins, stamped by con- 
servatism, by precious things accumulated, 
by tradition and authority. 

There is a certain melancholy about pru- 
dence ; it bears witness to innumerable pun- 
ishments suffered by ignorance and rashness, 
which must have been heaped up to a mon- 



218 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

strous mass in order to create prudence as an 
instinct. But the worst punishments were 
administered before prudence appeared, and 
we reap the harvest. It is dismal and pa- 
thetic to think that common men should 
receive advantage from the sufferings of 
Marlowe, Greene, Peele, Chatterton, Byron, 
Shelley, and Poe. But after this manner 
runs the world away. English literature has 
been nourished by such sufferings, and the 
English Empire has also received from indi- 
viduals all that they had to give. There is 
pathos in the reports sent by Hakluyt's trad- 
ers to the home company. The investors 
dangle round Hampton Court, or sit in their 
counting-rooms in the city, while the adven- 
turers leave England for years, brave hard- 
ships, risk disease and death, and send their 
duties back with humble hopes that their 
good masters in London may be content with 
what they do. 

" Coastwise — cross-seas — round the world and back again, 
Whither the flaw shall fail us, or the Trades drive down: 
Plain - sail — storm - sail — lay your board and tack 
again — 
And all to bring a cargo up to London town ! " 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 219 

IV 

Nevertheless, the desire to make money 
is not of itself capable of great action. It 
can put its livery upon a number of needy 
fellows who care not what they do, — who 
will trap beavers in Alaska, dig diamonds in 
Brazil, carry Hampshire kerseys to Tartars ; 
but its main function is to be the utensil for 
the true adventurer : if he will sail, it builds 
a ship ; if he will plant, it gives him seed ; 
if he will rob, it loads him with powder and 
shot ; it is the pack-mule that shall carry him 
and his equipment over the Alps of enter- 
prise. The real strength of money lies in 
the wild spirits that will use it. Curiosity 
seeking the secrets of the world, daring look- 
ing for giant obstacles, conquerors in search 
of possessions whereto their courage shall be 
their title-deeds, — these must have money- 
getters. They publish abroad their needs 
that are to be, and farmers, miners, weavers, 
spinners, millers, smiths, and all grubbers 
spare and save, sweating to serve romantic 
adventurers. 

The spirit of romance has flung its bold- 
ness into English literature. It plunders 



220 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

what it can from Greek, Latin, Italian, 
French, and Spanish. It ramps over the 
world : it dashes to Venice, to Malta, to Con- 
stantinople, to the Garden of Eden, to the 
Valley of the Shadow of Death, to Lilliput, to 
desert islands, to Norman baron and Burgun- 
dian noble, to Virginia, to Florence, to India, 
to the South Sea, to Africa, and fetches home 
to England foreign wealth by land and sea. 
How boldly it sails east, west, south, and 
north, and by its shining wake shows that it 
is the same spirit of romance that has voyaged 
from Arthurian legend to Mr. Kipling ! 

French men of letters have not had enough 
of this audacious spirit. They troop to Paris, 
where they have been accustomed to sit on 
their classical benches since Paris became 
the centre of France. The romance of Vil- 
lon is the romance of a Parisian thief ; the 
romance of Eonsard is the romance of the 
Parisian salon. Montaigne strolls about his 
seigniory while England is topsy-turvy with 
excitement of new knowledge and new feel- 
ing. Corneille has the nobleness of a jeune 
Jille. You can measure them all by their 
ability to plant a colony. Wreck them on a 
desert island, Villon will pick blackberries, 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 221 

Bonsard will skip stones, Montaigne whittle, 
Corneille look like a gentleman, and the 
empire of France will not increase by a 
hand's-breadth. Take a handful of Eliza- 
bethan poets, and Sidney chops, Shakespeare 
cooks, Jonson digs, Bacon snares, Marlowe 
catches a wild ass : in twenty-four hours they 
have a log fort, a score of savage slaves, a 
windmill, a pinnace, and the cross of St. 
George flying from the tallest tree. 

It is the adventurous capacity in English 
men of letters that has outdone the French. 
They lay hold of words and sentences and 
beat them to their needs. They busy them- 
selves with thoughts and sentiments as if 
they were boarding pirates, going the near- 
est way. They do not stop to put on uni- 
forms ; whereas in France the three famous 
literary periods of the Pleiade, the Classi- 
cists, and the Bomanticists have been three 
struggles over form, — quarrels to expel or 
admit some few score words, questions of 
rubric and vestments. The English have 
never balked at means after this fashion. 
Fenelon says of the French language " qu'elle 
n'est ni variee, ni libre, ni hardie, ni propre 
a donner de lessor." 



222 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

It is not fanciful to find this common ele- 
ment of daring in both English trade and 
poetry. English adventurers have sailed 
eastward and westward, seeking new homes 
for the extravagant spirits that find the veil 
of familiarity hang too thick over their na- 
tive fields and cottages. Turn to the French : 
their merchants ply to Canada and India in 
vain. What sails belly out before the poetry 
of Ronsard or Malherbe ? Into what silent 
sea is French imagination the first to break ? 
The Elizabethan poets are a crew of mari- 
ners, rough, rude, bold, truculent, boyish, and 
reverent. How yarely they unfurl the great 
sails of English literature and put to open 
sea! The poor French poets huddle together 
with plummet in their hands, lest they get 
beyond their soundings. 

No man can hold cheap the brilliant valor 
of the French. From Roncesvalles to the 
siege of Paris French soldiers have shown 
headlong courage. Nothing else in military 
history is so wonderful as the French soldiers 
from the 10th of August to Waterloo. Their 
dash and enterprise are splendid, but they 
do not take their ease in desperate fortune 
as if it were their own inn, as Englishmen 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 223 

do. They have not the shiftiness and cun- 
ning that can dodge difficulties. They can- 
not turn their bayonets into reaping-hooks, 
their knapsacks into bushels, their cannon 
to keels, their flags to canvas. They have 
not the prehensile hands of the English that 
lay hold, and do not let loose. 

English courage owes its success to its 
union with common sense. The French 
could send forty Light Brigades to instant 
death ; French guards are wont to die as if 
they went a-wooing; but the French have 
not the versatile absorption in the business 
at hand of the English. The same distinc- 
tion shows in the two literatures. Nothing 
could be more brilliant than Victor Hugo in 
1830. His verse flashes like the white plume 
of Navarre. His was the most famous 
charge in literature. Hernani and Ruy Bias 
have prodigious brilliancy and courage, but 
they lack common sense. They conquer, 
win deafening applause, bewilder men with 
excitement ; but, victory won, they have not 
the aptitude for settling down. They are 
like soldiers who know not how to go back 
to plough and smithy. The great French 
literature of the Komantic period did not dig 



224 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

foundation, slap on mortar, or lay arches in 
the cellar of its house, after the English 
fashion. Next to Victor Hugo, not count- 
ing Goethe, the greatest man of letters in 
Europe, of this century, is Sir Walter Scott. 
Mark the difference between him and Hugo. 
Scott's poetry and novels have a vigorous 
vitality from his common sense, and there- 
fore they are ingrained in the trunk of Eng- 
lish literature ; the fresh sap of their ro- 
mance quickens every root and adds greenery 
to every bough. Victor Hugo is passionate, 
imaginative, majestic, powerful, eloquent, 
demagogical, but he does not stand the hard 
test of squaring with the experience of com- 
mon men. 

Consider M. Zola, the greatest of living 
French novelists, and we find the same lack 
in him. His strong, sturdy talents have 
fought a brilliant and victorious fight ; but 
the brilliancy of his victory serves merely as 
a light to rally his enemies ; he has offended 
against the abiding laws of the common 
knowledge of common men, and his books 
have already passed the zenith of their glory. 
There is hardly a famous man who does not 
point the same moral. Michelet records the 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 225 

introduction of tobacco. " Des le debut de 
cette drogue, on put prevoir son effet. Elle 
a supprime le baiser. Ceci en 1610. Date 
fatale qui ouvre les routes ou rhomme et la 
femme iront divergents." Read Kenan's 
chapters upon King David. Take Racine, 
of whom Voltaire says " que personne n'a 
jamais porte Fart de la parole a un plus haut 
point, ni donne plus de charme a la langue 
francaise." He is noble, and appeals to the 
deepest feelings in men, — love, religion, 
heroism. By virtue of his spiritual nature 
he deserves great reverence, but he does not 
touch the understanding of common men. 
Ronsard, du Bellay, Clement Marot, have the 
same fault; they are witty, epigrammatic, 
musical, but they have not the one essential 
element. The two most successful French 
men of letters are the two possessing most 
common sense, Moliere and Balzac. 

Common sense is difficult to define, and 
suffers from a vulgar notion that it is totally 
separate and distinct from high virtues. It 
is Sancho Panza, but Sancho learned to ap- 
preciate Don Quixote. Common sense knows 
that it must be squire to the hero until the 
hero shall recognize his own dependence 



226 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

upon the squire. The wise and witty Vol- 
taire failed in this respect, for he did not 
understand the daily need of idealism. Com- 
mon sense sees the immediate obstacle which 
is to be overcome ; in order to sharpen a 
pencil, instead of Durandal or Excalibur, it 
uses a penknife. Common sense trims its 
sails to catch the breeze, be it a cat's-paw, 
but it does not avoid the hurricanes of pas- 
sion. Common sense uses common words; 
it husbands ; it practices petty economies, so 
that the means of the hero shall be ample 
to his great enterprise. Of itself it can do 
little, but it makes straight the path for 
great achievement. 

Jowett was fond of repeating Coleridge's 
remark that " the only common sense worth 
having is based on metaphysics." This say- 
ing is in part true, and it would not be over- 
curious to trace the indirect influence of 
metaphysics on the English Empire and on 
English literature. 



There is no profit, however, in attempt- 
ing to lug reason into this matter of the 
preference of English literature over French. 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 227 

There is no justification here except by- 
faith. There is none to hold the scales, 
while we heap English books into one to 
outweigh French books in the other. Men 
who have thrown off the bias of nationality 
have disqualified themselves for the task, for 
they have cut off all those prime feelings 
and blind, indistinct sentiments that must 
be the judges of last resort, and have set up 
in their stead reason propped on crutches of 
grammar, syntax, style, and euphony. In 
fundamental matters, the intellect must take 
counsel of the heart. Every man's memory 
has stored in some odd corner the earliest 
sounds of his mother's voice saying the 
Lord's Prayer ; it remembers the simple words 
that first distinguished the sun and the moon, 
buttercup and dandelion, Kai the bull ter- 
rier and Sally the cat. No cultivation, no 
sojourning in foreign lands, no mastery of 
many books, can erase these recollections. 
Some men there are whose conception of hu- 
man relations is so large and generous that 
to them the differences between peoples are 
slight, when matched with the resemblances. 
Such men are noble and lovable, but they 
are not qualified to pronounce upon the 



228 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

merits of two languages. Native language 
is restricting and confining so far as con- 
cerns peoples in international affairs, but it 
ennobles and enlarges fellow countrymen. 
Out of our native language are made our 
home and our country. The sweet sounds 
of speech heard only at home create our 
fundamental affections. The separation of 
nation from nation is a cheap price to pay 
for the great benefit which we of one people 
have received from the bond of common 
speech. 

That which is true of language is true of 
literature. The great books for us are the 
books which we read when we were young ; 
they bewitched us with our own language, 
they brought to us our English thoughts. 
The power of the English Bible is not the 
reward of merit only, — merit has never 
enjoyed such measure of success ; it exists 
because we read it and re-read it when we 
were little boys. This early language of 
our mother and of our books is part of the 
" trailing clouds of glory " that came with 
us from our home. Love of it is a simple 
animal instinct, and the man who can pro- 
claim himself free from it does not compre- 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 229 

Lend the riches of language or the great 
passions of life. We would alter a line of 
Wordsworth to fit this case : — 

" We must be bond who speak the tongue that Shakespeare 



We cannot throw off the strong shackles 
that Shakespeare, the Bible, and all our Eng- 
lish inheritance have put upon us; we are 
barred and bolted in this English tongue; 
only he who does not feel the multitudinous 
touch of these spiritual hands of the great 
English dead can stand up and say that the 
English and French languages are equal. 

Mr. Matthew Arnold used to instruct us 
— as a professor of Hellenism was bound to 
do — that we must divest ourselves of na- 
tional prejudices. We all admired him, and 
meant to mend our ways. He borrowed the 
word " saugrenu " from the French to tell 
us more exactly what manner of behavior 
was ours ; but faster than his prose pushed 
us on to international impartiality his poetry 
charmed us back. Mr. Arnold's poetry is 
essentially English; it is the poetry of an 
English Englishman. He is a descendant 
in direct line from Sidney, Herbert, Gray, 
Cowper, Wordsworth. He appeals to our 



230 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

native emotion ; he has English morals, Eng- 
lish sentiment, English beliefs and disbeliefs ; 
his character is doubly emphasized by his 
occasional imitation of Greek forms. He 
has about him the atmosphere of the Angli- 
can Church, — love of form, fondness for 
those emotions which are afraid to acknow- 
ledge instinct as their father, and yet shud- 
der at logic. Mr. Arnold is an English 
poet, and for that reason we love him, and 
disregard his entreaties for cosmopolitan stan- 
dards. 

We are intolerant ; we are among those 
persons from whom bigots successfully seek 
recruits ; we have little respect, and rightly 
enough, for the free play of our reason ; we 
follow the capricious humor of our affections. 
We like old trodden paths, on whose rude 
bottoms we can still discern the prints of our 
fathers' feet. We are yeomen of the mind, 
as ready to throw our intellectual caps in the 
air for a Henry VIII. as for Hampden and 
liberty. We have the dye of conservatism ; 
we cannot hide it for more than a few sen- 
tences, and then only upon forewarning. We 
have just cause to fear that our behavior is 
bad in the presence of the sonnets of M. 



ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 231 

Jose Maria de Heredia ; we make faces when 
we read Verlaine. We cannot take those 
gentlemen as poets. They look to ns like mas- 
queraders, harlequins, unfairly brought from 
the darkness of the stage into the light of 
the sun. Try as we may to read an essay 
by M. Brunetiere, a poem by M. Sully Prud- 
homme, or some French novel of the year, 
all is in vain. We must accept that condi- 
tion of the mind to which it has pleased God 
to call us. 

What a pleasure, after reading those books, 
to go back to old Hakluyt, and read aloud 
the lists of merchandise sent abroad or 
fetched home : item, good velvets, crimosins, 
purples and blacks, with some light watchet 
colours ; item, ten or twelve pieces of westerne 
karsies, thicked well and close shut in the 
weaving and died into scarlet ; item, one 
hundred brushes for garments (none made 
of swine's hair) ; item, forty pieces of fine 
holland. What breaking of fences, what 
smashing of locks, what air, what comrade- 
ship, what a sense of poetry ! Surely, there 
is more poetry in the making of the English 
Empire than was ever printed in France. 

Let us open wide the doors of our minds 



232 ENGLISH AND FRENCH LITERATURE 

and give hospitable reception to foreign litera- 
ture whence soever it may come, but let us 
not forget that it only comes as a friend to 
our intelligence, and can never be own brother 
to our affections. 

" A health to the native-born ! " 



DON QUIXOTE 



DON QUIXOTE 

It is always good news to hear that new 
champions are coming forward to translate 
" Don Quixote " into English. It is a bold 
deed, well worthy a knight-errant of the pen ; 
and if many men make the attempt, we may 
be perhaps so fortunate as hereafter to have 
a true English translation. " Don Quixote/' 
it is said in the Encyclopedia Britannica, has 
been translated into every language in Eu- 
rope, even including Turkish, but I cannot 
believe that any language is so fit as English 
to give the real counterfeit presentment of 
the book. One might guess that a Romance 
language would do better, but, on reflection, 
French prose lacks humor, and Italian has 
not sufficient subtlety to give the lights and 
shadows of " Don Quixote ; " and as for 
German prose, in spite of Goethe it still is 
German prose. There is a scintilla of truth, 
so far as this translation is concerned, in the 
saying of Charles V., that French is the Ian- 



236 DON QUIXOTE 

guage for dancing-masters, Italian for sing- 
ing birds, and German for horses. I should 
like to be able to read the Turkish transla- 
tion. I imagine that there must be a dignity 
and self-respect in the language that would 
befit Don Quixote to a nicety ; but for Sancho 
it would not do, — he would be homesick 
talking Turkish. 

There are a number of English transla- 
tions, — one by Mr. Shelton long ago, one 
by Smollett, and others by Motteux, Jarvis, 
Duffield, Ormsby, and Watts, — all more or 
less inadequate, if I may judge from parts, 
for I have never been so willful-blame as to 
read them all. In truth, the translation is a 
very difficult matter. Don Quixote himself 
is one of the most delicately drawn charac- 
ters in fiction ; almost every Spanish word he 
speaks stands out in the reader's mind, sepa- 
rate and distinct, like a stroke in a Rem- 
brandt etching. How can you measure out 
their English equivalents in the finely ad- 
justed scales of language unless you have 
ten talents for weights ? Epigrams are com- 
monly of little use in finding the way to 
truth, but Coleridge has left a saying that, 
I think, helps us materially in this matter of 



DON QUIXOTE 237 

translation. " Prose/ ' he said, " is words in 
the best order ; Poetry is the best words in 
the best order." Now, by what sleight of 
hand shall a man keep this best order of 
words in shifting thoughts from one lan- 
guage to another ? In poetry we are waking 
up to this, and Homer and Dante are ren- 
dered into English prose. Now and again a 
man, if he have the luck to be a man of 
genius, may make English poetry when he 
professes to translate a foreign poet. Such 
a one was Mr. Fitzgerald. But I know of 
no one who has made both poetry and a 
translation, with a few exceptions : such as 
Shelley in his translation of the angels' 
chorus in " Faust," Dr. Hedge with Luther's 
hymn, and Wordsworth with Michelangelo's 
sonnet, "Ben pub talor col mio ardente de- 
sio." Maybe the translators of the Old Tes- 
tament were such. 

Of all prose that I know, I should say that 
" Don Quixote " was the hardest to translate 
out of the original tongue ; for Cervantes has 
used his words in the best order very often, 
and his Spanish tongue was of so fine a tem- 
per — for it had been framed among high- 
strung gentlemen, quick in quarrel, urbane 



238 DON QUIXOTE 

in manner, and o£ a broad human courtesy 
such as gentlemen have in Utopia, and all 
men, I needs must think, in heaven — that 
the translator need be of a stout heart. 
Words are delicate works. Nature has nur- 
tured them, art has toiled over them. For 
a thousand years those Spanish words have 
been shaped by Spanish mouths, and now 
some zealous translator, like a lean apothe- 
cary, expects to catch their fragrance and 
cork it up in English smelling-bottles. All 
a nation's sentiment has gone into its words. 
Great musicians, architects, painters, and 
sculptors put into their works the feelings 
of their country and of their age, but these 
works remain the works of individuals and 
bear their personal stamp, whereas all the 
nation, at all times, from generation to gen- 
eration, has been putting its passions into its 
speech. The Spanish heart is not the Eng- 
lish heart. 

Moreover, the translator of Cervantes has 
another great difficulty. Don Quixote is the 
delineation of a man's character ; he is as 
real as any hero in fiction from Achilles to 
Alan Breck, and much more so than the he- 
roes who lie buried in Westminster Abbey. 



DON QUIXOTE 239 

" Er lebt und ist noch starker 
Als alle Todten sind." 

This very reality lies in the arrangement 
of words, and slips through the translator's 
fingers. The hero was alive and then is 
done into English, a process that has much 
similarity to embalming. To draw the like- 
ness of a living being in words is one of the 
most difficult tasks in art. "We all, no doubt, 
can remember some figure coming, in the 
days of our childhood, into our Eden from 
the vague outer world, that impressed itself 
deeply in our memories. Such a one I can 
remember, — a delicately bred gentleman, one 
of those in whom the gentle element was so 
predominant that perhaps the man was pushed 
too much aside. His bearing spoke of train- 
ing and discipline received in some place 
out of Eden that we knew not of, and there 
was a manner of habitual forbearance, almost 
shrinking, in his daily actions, as if he feared 
that whatever he touched might turn to sor- 
row, which still kept us behind the line across 
which his tenderness was ever inviting us. 
I think to describe his smile and to trans- 
late " Don Quixote " would be tasks of like 
quality. 



240 DON QUIXOTE 

But of all books in the world " Don 
Quixote " is the book for an English-speak- 
ing boy. There is a time in his boyhood 
while the sun of life throws a long shadow 
behind him, when, after he has read the 
Waverley Novels, Cooper, and Captain Mar- 
ryat, he pauses, hesitating between Thack- 
eray and Dickens. Which shall he take? 
The course is long, for a boy is a most just 
and generous reader. He reads his novelist 
straight through from start to finish, " David 
Copperfield," " Oliver Twist," "Nicholas 
Nickleby," " Old Curiosity Shop," and all, 
ending finally with a second reading of 
"Pickwick." That is the way novels should 
be read. Reading the first novel of one of 
the great men of literature is like Aladdin 
going down into the magic cave : it sum- 
mons a genie, who straightway spreads a 
wonderful prospect before you, but it is not 
till the second or third book that you under- 
stand all the power of the master slave. It 
is at that moment of hesitation that " Don 
Quixote" should be put into the boy's hands; 
but that cannot be done now because there 
is no satisfactory English translation. 

Of course, "Don Quixote" is a man's book, 



DON QUIXOTE 241 

also ; Cervantes has breathed into its nostrils 
the breath of life, and, like the macrocosm, 
it has a different look for the boy and for 
the man of fifty. You can find in it the 
allegory that the ideal is out of place in this 
workaday world, that the light shineth in a 
darkness which comprehendeth it not. You 
can find the preaching of vanity, if such be 
your turn of mind, in "Don Quixote" as well 
as in the world. But the schoolboy does not 
look for that ; there is no vain thing in life 
for him, and perhaps his is the clearer vision. 
And with this schoolboy, pausing as I have 
suggested on the brink of Thackeray or 
Dickens, a translation of "Don Quixote " has 
the best chance of success. Its defects will 
be of such a nature as will mar the man's 
enjoyment, but not his. It will give him the 
gallant gentleman pricked by a noble con- 
tempt for the ignoble triumphant and for 
the acquiescent many ; he shall have there 
the lofty disregard of facts that hedge in 
housekeepers, barbers, and parsons ; he shall 
find courage, endurance, knightliness, and 
reverence for woman. After a boy has once 
been squire to Sir Kenneth, to Ivanhoe, and 
to Claverhouse, what business has he in life 



242 DON QUIXOTE 

but to right wrongs, to succor maidens, and 
to relieve widows and all who are desolate 
and oppressed? What if this gallant gen- 
tleman be a monomaniac, and be subjected 
to disasters at the hands of farmyard louts 
and tavern skinkers, by windmills and galley 
slaves : must not Ivanhoe's squire march 
through Vanity Fair and lodge in Bleak 
House, his long breeches unentangled in 
spurs, and his chief weapon of offense car- 
ried in his waistcoat pocket? Heine says 
that he read "Don Quixote" for the first 
time when a boy, and that then he " did not 
know the irony that God put into the world, 
and which the great poet had imitated in his 
little world of print and paper." Heine is 
mistaken ; there is no question of knowledge 
and ignorance. The boy has his world as 
heavy to an ounce, weighed in scales of avoir- 
dupois, as that of a man of fifty, and there 
is no irony in it. The boy is not the subject 
of illusion ; there is in fact no irony there. 
The man of fifty, le soi-disant desillusionne, 
is certainly on the border of presumption, to 
say that it is there, and then to call the boy 
an ignoramus. To be sure, he commonly 
couples his offensive epithet with some miti- 



DON QUIXOTE 243 

gating adjective, as " happy fool," or thus, 
"his pretty ignorance." But in place of the 
adjective there should be an apology. Every 
man is born into a house where there is a 
chamber full of veritable chronicles of Tris- 
tram and Launcelot, of Roland and Rinaldo 
di Mont' Albano ; and if his housekeeper, 
his barber, and his parson wall up the door 
and tell him that Freston the great enchanter 
has swooped down on dragon back and car- 
ried it off by night, his acceptance of their 
assertions and his lofty compassion for his 
old illusions furnish but poor proof of wisdom. 
It is for the boy that a good translation 
should be made, and that might be done ; one 
in which Don Quixote shall talk like a schol- 
arly gentleman, and in which there shall be 
no conscious grin of the translator spoiling 
the whole, as in that wretched version by 
Motteux. The boy wants two qualities in 
his books, enthusiasm and loyalty ; and here 
he has them jogging on side by side through 
four good volumes. Sainte-Beuve says that 
Joubert's notion of enthusiasm was wiepaix 
ehvee ; a, boy's idea is la guerre elevee, and 
Cervantes was of that mind. He was a sol- 
dier of the best kind, fighting for Europe 



244 DON QUIXOTE 

against Asia at Lepanto, and esteeming his 
lost arm the most honorable member of his 
body. Don Quixote is the incarnation of 
enthusiasm ; and what loyalty was ever like 
Sancho's, even to the deathbed where he 
beseeches Don Quixote to live many years, 
" for it would be the utmost foolishness 
to die when no one had murdered him " ! 
There are many who are loyal to a friend's 
deeds, and some to his faults, but to be 
loyal to another's dreams and visions is the 
privilege of very few. Besides, the boy de- 
mands incident, and here there is the great- 
est variety of adventure, of that delightful 
kind that happens in La Mancha without 
having to be sought in Trebisond or Cathay. 
Another reason for a good translation is 
that "Don Quixote" is the first modern novel. 
It is the last of the romances of chivalry and 
the first novel ; and as, on the whole, most 
of the great novels are English novels (for 
what other language can show a like rich- 
ness to " Robinson Crusoe," " Tom Jones/ 5 
"Rob Roy," "Pride and Prejudice," "Vanity 
Fair," "David Copperfield," "Adam Bede," 
and " The Scarlet Letter "), there should be 
an adequate English version of it. So many 



DON QUIXOTE 245 

novels of much skill and force are written 
nowadays that we are too often swayed in our 
judgment of them by the pulse of the year or 
of the decade. Were it not well, after read- 
ing Mr. Meredith or Mr. Moore, to take our 
bearings by a mark that has withstood the 
changing sentiments of ten generations of 
mortal men ? " You cannot fool all the peo- 
ple all the time." Men during three hundred 
years are of so many minds, and have such 
diverse dispositions and temperaments, and 
are placed in such different circumstances, 
with various passions and prejudices, that 
any book that receives the suffrage of all is 
proved to be, to use Sainte-Beuve's phrase, 
un livre de Vhumanite. By going back to 
these great human books we learn to keep 
our scales truly adjusted. Goethe said that 
every year he was wont to read over a play 
by Moliere. 

There have been a great many theories 
about the book, speculations as to what pur- 
pose Cervantes had in view when he wrote 
it. The chief two are that he intended a 
burlesque upon romances of knight-errantry, 
and that he intended an allegorical satire 
upon human enthusiasm. Doubtless he be- 



246 DON QUIXOTE 

gan with the purpose of ridiculing the old 
romances, but, as Heine says, genius gallops 
ahead of its charioteer. By the seventh 
chapter he found himself with Don Quixote 
and Sancho Panza seeking adventures in La 
Mancha; he had in his heart a deep and 
serious knowledge of life, and in his brain 
wit and fancy such that the world has but 
once had better, and he wrote. Men must 
express the deep feelings within them : the 
common man to one or two by words and 
acts and silence, the man of genius to the 
world by such means as nature has made 
easiest for him. In Spain, since the inven- 
tion of printing, the one form of popular 
literature had been the romance of knight- 
errantry. The three great cycles of roman- 
tic fiction — of King Arthur and the Round 
Table, of Charlemagne and his Paladins, and 
of the Greek empires founded by Alexander 
the Great — had spread all over western 
Europe, and had long before served their 
office. Their place in Spain was filled by the 
romances of knight-errantry. Of these, the 
first and best was "Amadis of Gaul," which 
was probably written in Castile about the 
year 1350. The old version has been long 



DON QUIXOTE 247 

lost, but Garci-Ordonez de Montalvo wrote 
a new one some time after the conquest of 
Granada, which obtained wide popularity 
and still exists. The success of this was so 
brilliant that a great many books were writ- 
ten in imitation of it. In the middle of the 
sixteenth century these romances met with 
two powerful enemies : one was the spirit of 
the Catholic Reaction, the other the spirit of 
classical culture. In 1543 Charles V. forbade 
that any of these books should be printed 
or sold in the West Indies, and in 1555 the 
Cortes made its petition to the Emperor to 
make the like law for Spain. The text of the 
petition reads thus : " Moreover, we say that 
it is most notorious, the hurt that has been 
done and is doing in these kingdoms to young 
men and maids and to all sorts of people 
from reading books of lies and vanities, like 
Amadis and all the books which have been 
modeled upon its speech and style, also 
rhymes and plays about love and other vain 
things ; for young men and maids, being 
moved by idleness to occupy themselves with 
these books, abandon themselves to folly, 
and, in a measure, imitate the adventures 
which they read in those books to have hap- 



248 DON QUIXOTE 

pened, both of love and war and other vani- 
ties ; and they are so affected thereby that 
whenever any similar case arises they yield 
to it with less restraint than if they had not 
read the books ; and often a mother leaves 
her daughter locked up in the house, think- 
ing that she has left her to her meditations 
(recogida), and the girl falls to reading 
books of that kind, so that it were better 
if the mother had taken her with her. . . . 
And that it is to the great hurt of the con- 
sciences, because the more people take to 
these vanities, the more they backslide from 
and cease to find enjoyment in the Holy, 
True, and Christian Doctrine." Wherefore 
the petition asks that no more such books 
be printed, and that all those existing be 
gathered up and burned, and that no book 
be printed thereafter without a license ; " for 
that in so doing your Majesty will render a 
great service to God, taking persons from 
the reading of books of vanities, and bring- 
ing them back to read religious books which 
edify the mind and reform the body, and 
will do these kingdoms great good and 
mercy." Mr. Ticknor and other commenta- 
tors have gathered together condemnations 



DON QUIXOTE 249 

upon these romances uttered by various per- 
sons of note prior to the publication of " Don 
Quixote.'' There can be little doubt that 
these faultfinders were Puritans of the Cath- 
olic Reaction, and that the same spirit influ- 
enced the Cortes. In this same feeling the 
Puritans in England of Queen Elizabeth's 
time attacked the stage. 

In the preface to Part I., Cervantes repre- 
sents himself as sitting with his chin on his 
hand, pondering what he shall do for a 
preface, when a friend comes in, who, after 
making some rather dull suggestions, says, 
" This book of yours is an invective against 
books of knight-errantry ; . . . your writ- 
ing has no other object than to undo the 
authority which such books have among the 
uneducated;" and he ends with the advice, 
" Make it your purpose to pull to pieces the 
ill-based contrivance of these knight-errant 
books, which are hated by some, but praised 
by many more ; for if you accomplish this, 
you will have done a great deal." And Part 
II. ends with a declaration by Cide Hamete 
Ben Engeli (the author in disguise) that his 
"only desire has been to make men dislike the 
false and foolish stories of knight-errantry, 



250 DON QUIXOTE 

which, thanks to my true Don Quixote, are 
beginning to stumble, and will fall to the 
ground without any doubt." These are the 
arguments for limiting and cutting down 
the great purposes of the book, a commen- 
tary on the life of man, to a mere satire upon 
silly and extravagant romances ; but the book 
speaks for itself. 

With respect to the other theory, that Cer- 
vantes intended a satire upon human enthu- 
siasm, Mr. Lowell, in commenting, discovers 
two morals: the first, "that whoever quar- 
rels with the Nature of Things, wittingly or 
unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of 
it ; " the second, " that only he who has the 
imagination to conceive and the courage to 
attempt a trial of strength with what foists 
itself on our senses as the Order of Nature 
for the time being can achieve great results 
or kindle the cooperative and efficient enthu- 
siasm of his fellow men." By this interpre- 
tation the condemnation of the quarrel is 
itself condemned by the deeper moral. But 
it little profits to seek after Cervantes' mo- 
tives ; he wrote about life, and he does not 
draw any final conclusions. He observes 
and writes. He tells of a gentleman who 



DON QUIXOTE 251 

found the world out of joint, and with a 
" frolic welcome " proclaimed that he was 
" born to set it right." The attempt is fol- 
lowed by the most disastrous and delight- 
ful consequences. Don Quixote is sometimes 
triumphant, but many more times mocked, 
mauled, persecuted, and despitefully used by 
clown and duke, and Sancho shares all his 
fortunes. Side by side go Imagination on 
his hippogriff, and Common Sense on his 
donkey. At the end of the book, the reader, 
loving and admiring Don Quixote, loving 
Sancho, and having rejoiced at every piece of 
good fortune that has come to them on their 
ill-starred career, hates and despises all those 
who have ill used them, including those two 
wiseacres the Parson and the Barber. If the 
unoffending reader must draw a moral, he 
would seem to hit near the mark by infer- 
ring that enthusiasm justifies its own appel- 
lation, and that the divine in us is the only 
thing worth heeding and loving, though it 
behave with lunacies inconstant as the moon, 
or go to live with publicans and sinners. 
But why draw a moral at all ? Life is very 
big, and there is less dogma now than there 
used to be about the meaning or the worth 



252 DON QUIXOTE 

of it, and an observer of life may travel 
about and note what he sees without being 
compelled to stand and deliver his conclu- 
sions. What should we say if Cide Hamete 
Ben Engeli had made an end in good Arabic 
with " Life is but an integration of Matter 
with a concomitant dissipation of Motion " ? 
Let the great books of the world escape these 
hewers of epigrams and drawers of morals. 
Hamlet has escaped to a place of safety ; so 
has the Book of Job. Faust is on the way 
thither, and Don Quixote will one day keep 
them company. It is a tale of life drawn 
from the author's imagination, and it is 
enough to know that a man who had lost an 
arm in a sea-fight and had been a captive 
slave for five years, who had been poor and 
persecuted, began this joyous and merry his- 
tory in prison, and continued it in the same 
strain of joy and merriment to the end. Let 
any man tired 

" to behold Desert a beggar born, 
And needy Nothing trimmed in jollity," 

betake himself to " un lugar de La Man- 
cha" The very words conjure up spring- 
time, holidays, and morning sun, and he 
shall feel like the poet 



DON QUIXOTE 253 

" Quant erba vertz e f uehla par, 
E 1' flor brotonon per verjan, 
E 1' rossinhols autet e clar 
Leva sa votz e mov son chan." 



The joy of it is masculine and boyish ; it 
maketh for life, like all good things. The 
reader never stops to think whether there 
be wit or humor, irony or optimism. These 
questionings are foisted upon you by the 
notes. If you read a Spanish edition, be- 
ware of the notes. Some there are who, in 
their schooldays, acquired a wise preference 
of ignorance to notes, but I have known many 
who would stop in the middle of a sentence 
to read a note, and then begin again exactly 
at the asterisk where they had left off. The 
notes in the editions by the Spanish Acad- 
emy, Dr. Bowie, Pellicer, and Clemencin are 
all to be skipped. 

In Don Quixote we believe that we have 
a partial portrait of Cervantes. He has de- 
scribed somewhere his own physical appear- 
ance in a manner very like to the description 
of the knight, and in the latter' s character 
we feel sure that we have the real Cervantes. 
Certainly there is there the likeness of a 
high-spirited Spanish gentleman at a time 



254 DON QUIXOTE 

when Spanish gentlemen were the first in 
the world. Every little detail about the 
knight is told with such an intimate affec- 
tion that Cervantes must have been writing 
down whatever he believed was true of his 
own best self. The ready knowledge with 
which he wrote is manifest from the care- 
lessness with which he makes mistakes, as 
with Sancho' s ass, on which Sancho sud- 
denly mounts half a page after losing him 
forever, and in the names of la Senora Panza, 
and in various details. Certainly Cervantes 
is very fond of Don Quixote, and does him 
justice ; and he has a kindliness for the 
reader, too, and pays him for his sore sym- 
pathies every now and then by the joyous 
feeling of victory which he receives when 
Don Quixote, in the midst of a company that 
think him mad, delivers a brilliant harangue, 
leaving them confounded and the reader exul- 
tant. Sancho said Don Quixote ought to have 
been a parson, and you feel that he would 
have adorned any position of dignity within 
the gift of the Majesty of Spain. The art 
with which the story is told and the char- 
acters are drawn grows upon one's wonder. 
For example, Don Quixote has been lowered 



DON QUIXOTE 255 

down into the cave of Montesinos, and after 
some hours, during which Sancho has be- 
come much alarmed for his master's safety, 
he reappears and gives an account of the 
most marvelous adventures. Sancho and the 
reader are aghast ; they know that the ad- 
ventures cannot be true, and they know 
equally well that Don Quixote is incapable 
of telling a lie, and the wonder is whether 
he is mad or has been dreaming. This same 
wonder finally overtakes Don Quixote, and 
you feel, without being told, that he is strug- 
gling with his memory to find out what did 
really happen as he faces the awful possibil- 
ity that what he related may not have been 
true. There is a certain low fellow in the 
book, one Samson Carrasco, a friend of the 
Parson and the Barber, of good purposes, but 
of no imagination, who devises a scheme to 
fetch Don Quixote home. This plan was to 
arm himself as a knight-errant and take Don 
Quixote captive. The approach of the com- 
bat is very disagreeable ; you cover over with 
your hand the lines ahead of where you are 
reading, so that you may not read faster than 
you shall acquire fortitude to bear whatever 
may happen. And behold, Kosinante breaks 



256 DON QUIXOTE 

into a gallop, dear horse, — Boiardo and 
Bucephalus never did as much, — and the 
counterfeit knight is hurled to the ground. 
By the same dull device this vulgar Carrasco 
finally, near the end of the story, ran atilt 
with Don Quixote and unhorsed him. He 
dismounted, and stood over our hero with 
his spear. The terms of the combat were 
that he who was conquered should confess 
that the other's lady was the more beautiful. 
"Don Quixote, without raising his visor, 
with weak and feeble voice, as if he were 
speaking from within a tomb, replied : c Dul- 
cinea of Toboso is the most beautiful woman 
in the world, and I am the most miserable 
knight on earth, and it were not right that 
the truth should suffer hurt from my weak- 
ness; thrust home your lance, Sir Knight, 
and since you have taken my honor, take 
away my life also.' ' It were difficult to im- 
agine that this is a satire upon human nature, 
and that Cervantes made mock of the spirit 
of chivalry. 

One of the deepest and most delightful 
elements of the book is the relation between 
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza ; in fact, it 
is Sancho's obedience, his profound loyalty 



DON QUIXOTE 257 

and belief in his master, that throw both 
their characters into high relief : and here 
lies one of the hardest tasks for the trans- 
lator ; for unless their conversations are given 
with the delicacy and grace of the original, 
they cease to be Don Quixote and Sancho, 
and become mere comic figures. 

Sancho has never had full justice done to 
him. Affection and regard he has had in fair 
measure, no doubt. One loves him as one 
loves a dog ; not the noble, fair-limbed, fine- 
haired aristocrat, but the shag-haired little vil- 
lain, nullius films > who barks at your guests, 
and will gnaw a drumstick in my lady's cham- 
ber unless he be prevented. But Sancho's 
character and intelligence have not had their 
due. He is commonly spoken of as if he 
were one of old Gobbo's family, selfish and 
of loutish appetites ; but in truth he is not 
related at all. Sancho stands charged with 
greediness ; and as to eating, he ate well 
whenever he had an opportunity, but he 
worked very hard and needed food, for he 
often went supperless to bed, and was never 
sure of the morrow. His desire to be gober- 
nador was the imperial fault of ambition, 
and most honorable ; and when he governed 



258 DON QUIXOTE 

Barataria, he bore his great office meekly, 
and was a just and beneficent ruler. When 
Don Quixote first told him of the great for- 
tunes, even of a royal complexion, that some- 
times fall to the lot of the esquire to a 
knight - errant, his first thought was that 
Teresa Panza would be queen and his chil- 
dren princes. His intelligence bloomed and 
unfolded under the sunny influence of Don 
Quixote's company ; in fact, one of the most 
delightful things in the whole book is the 
elevation of Sancho's understanding as he 
travels from Part I. into Part II. Preface- 
makers say that Cervantes discovered how 
popular Sancho was, and, taking his cue 
accordingly, developed and expanded San- 
cho's wit and gifts of speech ; but the true 
reason is that living with a dreamer of 
dreams ennobles the understanding. When 
Don Quixote had forbidden the brutal la- 
borer to thrash the boy, and made him pro- 
mise by the laws of knighthood, the boy said, 
" My master is no knight ; he is rich John 
Haldudo, and he lives in Quintanar." " No 
matter," replied Don Quixote ; " the Haldu- 
dos may become knights ; every man is the 
child of his own actions." By his faithfulness 



DON QUIXOTE 259 

and loyalty to his master, Sancho's condition 
was made gentle and his intelligence was 
quickened. Even in the beginning Sancho 
is by no means backward in comprehension. 
Don Quixote resolves to get a sword that will 
cut through any steel and prevail over all 
enchantment. Sancho apprehends that the 
virtue of the sword may be personal to Don 
Quixote, and of no avail to him, as he is only 
an esquire. And he explains that the reason 
why Don Quixote was horribly beaten by the 
Yanguesian cattle-drivers was that he had 
neglected to observe his vow not to eat baked 
bread or do sundry other things until he 
should have obtained Mambrino's helmet. 
Don Quixote quietly replies that that is so, 
and that Sancho was beaten also for not re- 
minding him. Sancho has a generous hu- 
man sympathy, too ; for when Don Quixote 
finds Cardenio's love-letter, he asks him to 
read it aloud " que gusto mucho destas cosas 
de amoves" The difference in their views 
of life, however, and the help they render 
each other in getting into difficulties, is the 
precious quality of the book. 

There are a hundred men who admire and 
reverence Dante for his fierce seriousness and 



260 DON QUIXOTE 

burning convictions about life, to one who 
would feel that the like reverence and admi- 
ration were due to the laughing seriousness 
and smiling convictions of Cervantes. Heine 
somewhere draws a picture of the gods din- 
ing and Hephsestos limping among them to 
pour out the wine, while their laughter floats 
off over Olympus, when suddenly in the 
midst of them stalks a Jew and flings down 
a cross upon the banquet -table, and the 
laughter dies. But with the revolving years 
laughter has once more come to take its place 
as a divine attribute, and Cervantes' serious- 
ness, his sympathy and loving-kindness, may 
set him, in the estimation of men, as high, as 
wise, as deep, as Dante. I think with what 
pleasure he and Shakespeare met in the 
Happy Isles and laughed together, while 
Dante, a guisa di hone, sat sternly apart. 
What happier time was there ever in those 
Islands of the Blest than that sweet April 
wherein those two landed from Charon's 
bark? For surely Shakespeare's spirit tar- 
ried a few days that they might make their 
voyage and entrance together. In Cervantes, 
says Victor Hugo, was the deep poetic spirit 
of the Eenaissance. In him was the milk of 



DON QUIXOTE 261 

loving-kindness. After reading his book, 
we see a brighter light thrown on the simple 
human relations, the random meetings of men 
and women in this world of ours that is not 
so unlike to La Mancha, and we become more 
sensitive to the value of words spoken by hu- 
man lips to human ears, and of the touch of 
the human hand in our greetings and part- 
ings. It is not the usage among soldiers to 
confess their own tenderness, and Cervantes 
has thrown over his confession the veil of 
irony. Heinrich Heine did the like. These 
proud men would not have their women's 
hearts show on their sleeves, and they mocked 
the world. It was easily done. 

" Diese Welt glaubt nicht an Flammen, 
Und sie nimmt's fiir Poesie." 

In Algiers, Cervantes, with some of his fel- 
low captives, devised several plans of escape, 
all of which failed, and he was threatened 
with torture if he would not disclose the 
names of the conspirators and the story of 
the plot. He told nothing but that he alone 
was responsible. So he did; so he wrote. 
He obeyed the great prayer made to each of 
the children of men : " Simon, son of Jonas, 
lovest thou me ? Feed my sheep." 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

It was my good luck to spend my last 
holidays with two companions. One was my 
canoe, — a canvas canoe painted maroon. 
Its paddle has but one blade. There is a 
seat for another paddler in the bow, and 
room amidships for a passenger to lie quite 
comfortable. It is somewhat difficult for one 
to paddle a canoe meant for two. You put 
your kit and a bag of sand in the bow, lean 
a little to one side, and take your strokes 
as even as you can. In this way, in calm 
weather, you make good speed ; but when the 
wind blows a few points off the bow, nothing 
but great experience or sudden genius will 
help you. The canoe moves as if of a sud- 
den it had heard music from Venusberg ; it 
whirls about, once, twice, and breaks into a 
jig ; then frolicking with the wind, pirouettes 
back whence you came, bobbing its bow like 
a dancing-master. " Certes c'est un subject 
merveilleusement vain, divers et ondoyant 
que " le canot. 



266 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

I started at the southern end of Lake 
George. The cars had been hot, and the 
freight-master and expressman had both laid 
violent hands on my canoe. From them I 
rescued it only by paying fees under duress, 
which were subsequently returned to me by 
persons in authority. The sun was high, a 
light breeze blew upon my back, a soft gray 
cloud hung over me like an umbrella. My 
pack and the sand-bag balanced my stroke. 
My sandwiches and a bottle of soda-water 
lay safe in a tin pail under the seat. The 
blue-gray hills rose sleepily in the distance. 
The trees on the shore bunched themselves 
into indistinctness, and hid all but the chim- 
neys of the houses. A noisy, self-assured 
little launch puffed up to us, and finding us 
in all points uninteresting, whistled off up 
the lake. I became perfectly content. 

My other companion, carefully covered by 
a rubber blanket, lay still a little forward of 
the middle thwart. He was very fine in a 
new half -calf binding, which he had got from 
the money saved by the economy of a foot 
in the length of the canoe. The lake was 
so smooth that there was no danger of water- 
drops, and I took off the rubber blanket that 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 267 

I might see him. He looked very dignified 
in his bronze-and-black covering. I had 
been told that a canoe trip offered me a rare 
opportunity to learn what science in one of 
its branches had been doing of late, — sci- 
ence in popular dress humbling itself to the 
level of lewd persons, like Shakespeare's Bol- 
ingbroke on a holiday. 

But I preferred the companionship of let- 
ters, and only hesitated as to whether I should 
take with me a man of the world or a credu- 
lous believer. In the city, a believer is most 
sympathetic. We like to hear a man dare to 
affirm and be simple, to take his oath that 
the sky is blue, the earth solid, that right is 
right, and assert dogmas on heights, depths, 
and breadths ; we cry out for a St. Paul, an 
Emperor Julian, a Wendell Phillips ; we care 
little as to the content of the beliefs, but we 
cannot stomach the irresolute middle ground. 

" Questo misero modo 
Tengon 1' amme triste di coloro, 
Che visser senza infamia e senza lodo." 

We like to hear men trundle their push-carts 
up and down Broadway and Tremont Street, 
hawking old creeds. Give us anything which 
will protect us against the incessant rolling 



268 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

and pitching of unstable thought. In the 
city it is not well to cope with a man of the 
world, we shrink before " son don de sou- 
rire de son ceuvre, d'y etre superieur." He 
has us at a disadvantage and presumes upon 
it ; he turns all the happenings among crowd- 
ing men and women into parables for his 
triumph and our discomfiture. 

In the country all this is reversed. In 
quiet and fresh air, dogmas grow heavy as 
poppy and mandragora ; they vex us. Why 
should we join this guild of thought, that 
club of notions, that body metaphysical ? 
We turn impetuously to the man of the 
world ; his knowledge can no longer put us 
out of countenance, his experience is no bet- 
ter than an oyster fork in a jungle. Inevit- 
ably I rushed to Montaigne, and was justi- 
fied. Nothing is more delightful than to be 
with Montaigne on water and under trees ; 
he ceases to have any of the superciliousness 
of a man of the world, and plays the elder 
brother come back from far travel and from 
meeting many men. No matter how often 
you may have read him in town, he is more 
kind, more genuine, more simple, when you 
meet him in this way and hear him talk at 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 269 

ease. It is a constant pleasure to find how 
quick is his sympathy with happiness, how 
keen his compassion for sorrow. 

Lake George is pretty well surrounded by 
a cordon of houses, but by a discriminating 
course these may be avoided. There is a lit- 
tle cove hid behind a point of land, which, 
beaked with a rock, juts into the lake. It is 
hard by a house marked " The Antlers " on 
the map. This map you buy in the cars from 
the newsboy. It is the appendix to a book 
containing a eulogy on Lake George. Leave 
the eulogy on the seat ; the map is very use- 
ful. This little cove has a graveled edge 
whereon to beach the canoe. From the rocky 
beak you dive into three fathoms of trans- 
parent water down towards the blue-green 
rocks at the bottom. After that sandwiches 
and soda-water. Next a pipe filled with 
long cut, and opening volume one, the spirit 
of Michel de Montaigne sits beside you dis- 
coursing. A skeptic, using the word with 
reference to life in general, is intended to 
mean one whose ideas have no home, but 
travel from inn to inn like wandering Jews ; 
a man whose mind is like a fine lady before 
a milliner's mirror, who tries on one bonnet 



270 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

after another, looks at it before and behind, 
over the shoulder, at this angle and that, 
but cannot prevail upon herself to say, I take 
this, this is mine. And as this word " skep- 
tic " is commonly used of one with whom the 
speaker finds some fault, it carries a tinge of 
ill ; it signifies a person who does not be- 
lieve that men act from disinterested motives, 
does not recognize the importance of human 
feelings, who denies the dignity of human 
existence, — one in whose presence we are 
ashamed of our love for the melodramatic. 

The greatest believer in humanity that 
has ever lived in Europe is Shakespeare. If 
a man be morbid, if somebody's toes tread 
upon the kibes on his heel, if he be disheart- 
ened by ill success in his government of life, 
and, like the blind man beating the post, can 
discover no virtue in men and women, he be- 
takes himself to Shakespeare. There he finds 
the dignity of man written in capital letters. 
So it is with the books of all great men, or 
perhaps one should say of all great men 
whose fame and books have lived. Men and 
women do not cherish those who despise 
them. The books of misanthropes lie un- 
read in national museums. Dust to dust. 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 271 

There is no resurrection for them. There- 
fore one has a right, in approaching a man 
whose books are on the shelves of every li- 
brary, to assume that he is not a skeptic in 
any unworthy sense. To judge a man, mark 
what interests him. Positive testimony, as 
lawyers say, outweighs negative evidence. 
In his discourse De la Tristesse, Montaigne 
tells how, after his capture by Cambyses, 
Psammenitus watched with apparent serenity 
his son marched to death, his daughter borne 
away a slave, but on beholding one of his 
servants maltreated burst into weeping. It 
might be thought, says Montaigne, that his 
fortitude, equal to the first sorrows, had at 
last been overcome, as the last straw breaks 
the camel's back. But when Cambyses ques- 
tioned him, Psammenitus answered, " It is 
because this last displeasure may be mani- 
fested by weeping, whereas the two former 
exceed by much all meanes and compasse to 
be expressed by teares." He tells so many 
anecdotes of this kind that we are bound to 
reject the word " skeptic " as applicable to 
Montaigne in any mean and narrow sense. 

If there be in him one quality more than 
another that wins the affection of the reader, 



272 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

it is a certain manner of courtesy, of hospi- 
tality, familiar, yet of trained urbanity, which 
infects all these discourses. The reader finds 
that Montaigne is wise, but he meets no sug- 
gestion that he himself is f oolish ; he dis- 
covers that Montaigne is of wide experience, 
and he does not stop to think it odd that 
this experience, though so broad, tallies at all 
points with his own, which, had he stopped 
to think, he would have known to be narrow. 
It is with such skill and good breeding that 
your host leads you from matter to matter. 
He spreads before you one thing after an- 
other with the freshness and unexpectedness 
of a conjurer who suddenly out of your own 
memory produces meditations and reflections 
which you had not known were there. It is 
as if you were both ruminating upon a theme 
of common experience. Intermingled with 
his stories and reflections, his talk about him- 
self, with its apparent self-revelation, pleases 
us wholly. Montaigne affects to wish us to 
believe that the book is about himself. He 
keeps repeating, " C'est moy que je peins." 
" These are but my fantasies, by which I en- 
deavour not to make things knowen, but my- 
self e." " Others fashion man, I repeat him ; 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 273 

and represent a particular one but ill made." 
While the book is in your hand, this egotism, 
or rather, say friendliness, seems to indicate 
a discriminating intimacy with you, giving 
you to feel that, unconsciously as it were, he 
bends and unfolds himself in consequence of 
the atmosphere of your personality. It is 
this flattery in his urbanity that has made 
people believe in his simplicity and sincer- 
ity. Readers should be guileless as children, 
simple, innocent, unsophisticated. And it 
may be that Montaigne is genuine. Breed- 
ing need not displace nature. Montaigne 
does not become a double-dealer because his 
manners are good and put us at our ease. 
One is a little ashamed to question Mon- 
taigne's portrait of himself. Yet it is hard 
not to do so, for he has the manner of a 
well-graced actor. There is no imputation 
of ill upon Montaigne in suggesting that he 
does not give us his real picture. Unless 
a man's heart be pure gold, the public weal 
does not demand that he wear it on his 
sleeve. Moreover, it may be that Montaigne 
endeavors to draw himself, and yet, his tal- 
ents not permitting, does not. Howbeit, his 
manner has a perpetual charm. One would 



274 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

have young men fashion their outward be- 
havior upon M. de Montaigne. 

From this little cove near " The Antlers " 
there are some seven miles to the Narrows, 
and it is well worth while to cover them be- 
fore sunset, in order to see the shadows from 
the western hills crawl up on those to the 
east. It means a steady and industrious 
paddle. I had consulted the map as to where 
to spend the night, and had determined upon 
the clump of houses denominated " Hulett's ; " 
for the size of the asterisk on the map seemed 
to import an inn or a lodging-house, and sug- 
gested to my luxurious mind generous ac- 
commodations, — perhaps Bass's ale for din- 
ner, and a bath. The wind blew from behind 
quite fresh. I tucked Montaigne well under 
his blanket, tilted the canoe slightly to the 
side I paddled on, and watched the gradual 
sinking of the sun and the little splashes of 
the waves as they ran beside me. After a 
paddle of a number of miles comes fatigue be- 
tween the shoulder-blades ; it can be likened 
to nothing but a yoke or the old man that 
sat astraddle of Sindbad's neck. On feel- 
ing this yoke, to obtain relief, you paddle on 
the other side of the boat. A better remedy 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 275 

is to take a swim. The wind blew fast up 
the Narrows, and I was thankful it came to 
aid me, for I could not have made head 
against it. Spray from the wave-tops spat- 
tered into the canoe, and it was hard to keep 
it steady. It was as if the bow had a potent 
desire to look round at me. First it swerved 
to right, then to left, and after trying this 
succession for a number of times, lulling me 
into routine and security, after a turn to star- 
board it made believe to turn as usual to 
port ; but just when my paddle was ready to 
meet that manoeuvre it swung back to star- 
board, spattering the water so thick that 
Montaigne stood well in need of his blan- 
ket. Then the canoe lay limp, as if it were 
completely exhausted and wholly meritorious, 
like Roland in the market-place at Aix. 
Every wave tipped it to and fro, while I 
brandished the paddle to right and to left 
to keep from shipping enough water to sink 
me. After a few minutes, like a puppy that 
has been playing dead dog, it jumped to 
what would have been its keel if it had had 
one, and shot on over the water. The set- 
ting sun shed a golden brown over the hill- 
tops to the east ; under the shadow-line the 



276 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

trees passed into gloom, and haze rose from 
the water's edge as if to hide a troop of 
Undines coming forth from their bath. To 
the west, against the ebbing light, the hills 
stood out black, and the little islands passed 
quickly by dotted with wooden signs, " gov- 
ernment property," which looked in the dis- 
tance like gray tombstones. I went ashore 
to He down, rest, and read for a few minutes 
before dark. It may be the trees, the wind 
moving among the leaves, the jagged out- 
line of the leaves themselves, or merely the 
smell of the pines, it may be the water of 
the lake rippling over the changing colors 
of the stones, it may be the sky framed by 
the boughs overhead, or it may be all in com- 
bination, yet by them and in them a man 
grows wiser, his limitations relax their ten- 
tacles and loose their hold, 

" While with an eye made quiet by the power 
Of harmony and the deep power of joy 
We see into the life of things." 

Nature proffers a test of genuineness for 
a book the like of which cannot be found 
elsewhere. Out of doors, amid the simpler 
life of earth, motives for deception fail, 
masks are cumbersome ; disguises grow too 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 277 

heavy to wear, and are transparent at that. 
By some strange power, the inner reality 
throws its shine or shadow through the 
man's waistcoat, through the book's cover, 
over the outer semblance. The pine is the 
clearest-eyed tree of all trees. Its needles are 
so many magnets pointing towards the truth. 
Read Cervantes under the pine-tree, and 
you will find the marks o£ Don Quixote's 
heels and lance-butt fresh in the moss. Read 
Dante there after the sun has set, when the 
light begins to fail and the chill wind rises, 
and you must stop your ears against the 
" sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai." It makes one 
marvel to mark how sensitive the pine-tree 
is to its company. Its tones, its shape, its 
colors, vary ; it draws in its needles and pro- 
trudes them as if it fetched deep breaths. Its 
voice has the bass notes of seriousness and 
the treble of a boy's merriment. The deep 
brown resin on its trunk holds the light as 
if there were fire within. I think there is 
a strain of Clan Alpine in us all ; we owe 
allegiance to the pine. 

Perhaps Montaigne does not sympathize 
with great emotions, but he is interested, 
deeply interested, in the drama of human 



278 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

existence ; he has the instinct of dramatic 
feeling ; he cares not only for the free play 
of life, but also for a particular outcome ; he 
prefers one issue to another : not that Virtue 
should be rewarded and Vice punished, but 
that Prudence should be happily married and 
Folly be pointed at. Common Sense is the 
god of his divinity. 

Pascal complains, " Montaigne parloit trop 
de soi." A grievous fault if a man lack 
charm, but Montaigne is charming. One 
would not that young Apollo — he that is 
killing a lizard on a tree-stump — should 
wear jacket and trousers. Montaigne makes 
no pretense of self-effacement. He says, I 
will write about myself. He embroiders 
" Ego " on his banner, and under that sign 
he has conquered. If men dislike apparent 
egotism, let them leave Montaigne. Such 
men should vex themselves at all expression, 
for all fiction and art are ripe with person- 
ality. But is this portrait of Montaigne by 
himself really indicative of egotism ? For 
my part, it is as if Boswell had found Dr. 
Johnson in himself. Here is a man with a 
rare gift of delineation. He sits for his own 
portrait. But above this rare gift and con- 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 279 

trolling it sits the indeterminate soul ; and 
as essay succeeds essay, this soul, uncertain of 
itself, half mocking his readers, half-mock- 
ing himself, says, Here is the portrait of 
Michel de Montaigne ; but if you ask me, 
reader, if it be like me, — eh bien, que 
scay-je? 

In half an hour I was in the canoe again, 
laboring vigorously. After a paddle in 
rough waters of half a dozen miles a man 
of ordinary brawn begins to think of shore. 
The sun had set, the western light had faded 
and gone. The stars were out. Hulett's, 
with its cold bath, cool ale, and hot beef- 
steak, began to stand out very clear and dis- 
tinct before my mind's nose and eyes, but 
there were no physical signs of it. Hulett's 
has a post-office, and in view of this govern- 
mental footing it is, to my thinking, under a 
sort of national obligation to shine out and 
be cheerful to all wayfarers by land and 
water. I kept my eyes fixed over the star- 
board bow. The miles grew longer ; ordi- 
nary miles became nautical. The yoke upon 
my neck would not budge, shift the paddle 
as I might. The wind dropped down ; the 
water reflected Jupiter looking out through 



280 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

a rift in the clouds ; the widening lake lay 
flat to the shore, over which hung a black- 
ness that I took to be the outline of the hills. 
The monotony of the stroke, usually so fa- 
vorable to reflection, played me false. The 
beat of the paddle, which during the day had 
had a steady half-musical splash, and had 
scattered drops like the tang of a rhyme at 
the end of every stroke, made no sounds but 
bath — bath — bath — Bass — Bass — Bass 
— Hu — Hu — Hu — letts — letts — letts. 
But no lights ; only the flat water and the 
dark outline widening out. Montaigne van- 
ished from my mind. I thought of nothing, 
and repeated to myself solemnly, " A miss is 
as good as a mile, — a miss is as good as a 
mile ; " wondering what conclusion I could 
draw from this premise. Lights at last. 
First one, which grew and expanded and 
divided in two, then in four, and other lights 
appeared beyond. In a few minutes I 
dragged the canoe up on a little beach, 
tipped it upside down, tucked a volume of 
Montaigne under my arm, slung my night- 
pack on my paddle, and approached a piazza 
and voices. I skirted these, and reached a 
back door. A low growl elicited a pleasant 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 281 

a Be quiet/' from some one in authority. 
The light streamed from the opened door. 
I explained my desires, and received a short 
answer that this house took lodgers, but that 
it was very particular, and " what 's more, 
the house is full." I guessed that my ap- 
pearance made against me. I trusted that 
my speech was better than my clothes, and 
tried to remember what I could of travelers 
in distress. I felt for my purse. A very 
worn and dingy leather met my fingers. I 
withdrew my hand and talked fast, recalling 
how Ulysses' volubility had always stood him 
in good stead. I was successful. The house 
expanded, put forth an extra room ; a tub 
was found, also chops and Milwaukee beer. 
What a blessing is the power of recuper- 
ation in man ! Dinner done, I lighted my 
pipe and fell into discourse with Montaigne. 
This after-dinner time is the time of all the 
day to sit with Montaigne. The mind rests 
at ease upon its well-nourished servant, and 
lack of desire begets interest. You yield 
to the summons of hien-etre ; the land of 
socialists, of law, of railroads and time-tables, 
bows and withdraws, leaving you alone in 
the world of leisure. More than in other 



282 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

worlds Montaigne is at home here. His 
voice has leisure in it. The titles of his dis- 
courses, " Of Sadnesse," " Of Idlenesse," 
" Of Lyers," " Whether the Captaine of a 
Place Besieged Ought to Sallie Forth to Par- 
lie/' " Of the Incommodity of Greatnesse," 
are leisurely ; his habit is leisurely. Leisure 
sits in his chair, walks when he walks, and 
clips out anecdotes from Plutarch for him. 
Bordeaux, during his mayoralty, must have 
abounded in trim gardens. Yet there is no- 
thing lazy here. Jacques Bonhomme may 
be lazy, bourgeois gentils-hommes may be 
lazy, but Montaigne has leisure. As you 
read you have time to contemplate and re- 
flect ; you are not impatient to pass through 
the garnishment of his essay and come to 
the pith, in which you believe that Mon- 
taigne will most truly say what he truly 
thinks. Here is the intellectual charm of 
the book, — out of all he says to lay hands 
upon his meaning and ascertain his attitude. 
The problem is ever present. Is there an 
attempt on his part, by an assumed self- 
revelation, to mislead, or does the difficulty 
lie in his very genuineness and simplicity? 
Does his belief lie concealed in his anec- 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 283 

dotes, or is it set forth in his egotistical sen- 
tences ? Is he playing his game with you, 
or only with himself ? To my mind, it is 
as if he divided himself and were playing 
blind-man's buff ; one half blindfolded, grop- 
ing and clutching, the other half uncaught 
still, crying, " Here I am ! " The same im- 
pression is left whether he talks of himself 
or suggests theories of life and death. 
" The world runnes all on wheeles. All 
things therein moove without intermission ; 
yea, the earth, the rockes of Caucasus, and 
the Pyramides of iEgypt, both with the 
publike and their own motion. Constancy 
it selfe is nothing but a languishing and 
wavering dance. I cannot settle my object ; 
it goeth so unquietly and staggering, with 
a naturall drUnkennesse. I take it in this 
plight, as it is at th' instant I ammuse my 
selfe about it. I describe not the essence but 
the passage ; not a passage from age to age, 
or as the people reckon, from seaven yeares 
to seaven, but from day to day, from min- 
ute to minute. My history must be fitted 
to the present." Is not this sense of uncer- 
tainty the very effect Montaigne wishes to 
leave upon the reader's mind ? And how 



284 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

could he do it better than by putting forth a 
portrait of himself, saying, This is according 
to the best of my knowledge, and refusing 
to say, This is a true picture ? If a man, 
set to the task of describing himself, cannot 
accomplish it, what assurance of correspond- 
ence have we between things in themselves 
and our knowledge, which for the most is 
nothing but portraits of things drawn by 
others, and coming to us through a succes- 
sion, each copy in which is stamped with un- 
certainty ? Has he not left this portrait of 
himself as the great exemplar of his doc- 
trine ? It is his secret. Whatever it be, it 
is his humor, his chosen method of expres- 
sion. I believe he wishes to tell the reader 
about himself, but cannot be sure that he is 
showing himself as he is. He found much 
pleasure in trying to explain himself by say- 
ings and stories gathered from Plutarch. 
There was something in the ingenuity of the 
method that gratified him. 

There could be no better evidence of the 
work and anxiety spent upon these essays 
than that given by a comparison of the two 
first editions. Montaigne wrote them and 
rewrote them. One can feel the hesitation 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 285 

and deliberation with which he chose his 
words. He says : " It is a naturall, simple, 
and unaffected speech that I love, so written 
as it is spoken, and such upon the paper as 
it is in the mouth, a pithie, sinnowie, full, 
strong, compendious, and materiall speech, 
not so delicate and affected as vehement and 
piercing. Rather difficult than tedious, void 
of affectation, free, loose and bold ; not Pe- 
danticall, nor Frier-like, nor lawyer-like, but 
rather downe right, as Suetonius calleth that 
of Julius Caesar." The French men of let- 
ters in the seventeenth century thought that 
Montaigne had no art, and in England, 
George Savile, the distinguished Marquis of 
Halifax, in accepting the dedication of Cot- 
ton's translation, says : He " showeth by a 
generous kind of negligence that he did not 
write for praise, but to give the world a true 
picture of himself and of mankind. . . . He 
hath no affection to set himself out, and 
dependeth wholly upon the natural force of 
what is his own and the excellent application 
of what he borroweth." With great respect 
let it be said that this is a mistake. Mon- 
taigne had great art, and not art alone, but 
arts and artifice of all kinds. Every great 



286 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

book is a work of art. Every book that sur- 
vives its own generation is a work of art. 
No one knew this better than Montaigne. 
He desired immortality, and wrote to that 
end. His book is the fruit of hard labor, of 
thought deliberate, considerate, affectionate ; 
it has been meditated awake, and dreamed 
upon asleep ; cogitated walking, talking, 
afoot, and on horseback. Nothing in it has 
been left to chance and the minute. The 
manuscript at breakfast was his newspaper, 
after dinner his cigar ; out of doors it was 
in his pocket, it lay under his pillow at 
night. 

Sitting in his library in the third story 
of the chateau's tower, pacing up and down 
the corridor leading to it, cantering on his 
comfortable cob, promenading in his vege- 
table garden, you would think him as far 
and safe from disturbance as from the vol- 
canoes in the moon. Yet when he betook 
himself to his chateau it was but twelve 
months before the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew. Leaguers and Huguenots, men with 
the meanest conception of leisure, ramped 
about the land. Montaigne ate and slept 
in his unguarded house; read Seneca and 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 287 

Jacques Amyot ; picked up sentences on the 
vanity of life wherever he could find them, 
fixing them into the walls of his library; was 
amiable to his wife and tended his daugh- 
ter's education, while idealism and turbulence 
ranged abroad, spilling the wines of France 
and milk of Burgundy. 

For a book to succeed in, surviving its 
own generation is a strange matter. Force, 
says science, is eternal ; but what is force ? 
Calvin lies neglected on the shelf, while 
Michel de Montaigne prospers and multi- 
plies. His children, the essayists, are like 
sparrows in spring, singing, chattering, chirp- 
ing everywhere. 

The bed at S Point that night was 

very comfortable. The next day I learned 
by circuitous questioning — for, I regret to 
say, I had let my hostess understand, or 
rather I had not corrected her misunder- 
standing, that her house had been my hope 
and aim all the weary afternoon — that I 
had passed Hulett's in the dark. Post-office, 
inn, cottages, boathouse, all abed by nine 
o'clock, and lamps extinguished. Never was 
there such a pitiful economy of light. 

To reach the northern end of the lake 



288 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

needs but a short paddle. At that point is 
a little shop, where cider and ginger-pop are 
sold. The proprietor has a horse and cart, 
and for a dollar will ferry a canoe across to 
Lake Champlain. The little river that con- 
nects the two lakes is impassable on account 
of its fall. The mills make a poor return 
for the turning of their wheels by fouling 
the water. All the way to Ticonderoga the 
water looks like slops; there is little plea- 
sure rowing there. I passed the night at 
Ticonderoga Hotel, and left at dawn. The 
day began to break as I launched my canoe. 
Near the shore stood a clump of locust-trees, 
whose branches interarched, dividing the 
eastern sky into sections of orange, green, 
and pink; their trunks black as ink from 
rain in the night, save on the edges, where 
the morning colors streaked the outlines with 
yellow light. In the afternoon of the day 
before, under the shadow of the trees, I had 
wondered whether Montaigne had sympathy 
for the bigger emotions of life. In the early 
morning I knew that he had not. The rising 
sun is imperious in its requisition. Under its 
rays, the blood flows fast, muscles tighten, 
eyes brighten, cheeks color, sinews swell. 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 289 

We want love, ambition, recklessness, prayer, 
fasting, perils, and scars. Talk to us then 
of 

" Le donne, i cavalier, 1'arnie, gli amori, 
Le cortesie, l'audaci imprese." 

Keep Seneca and Epictetus for winter even- 
ings, sewing societies, and convalescence. By 
ill luck it happened that the sun was not an 
hour high, and the light ran over the ripples 
on the lake as if creation were beginning, 
and creation's lord were 

" in Werdelust 
Schaffender Freude nah," 

when I opened Montaigne and read that he 
had once been in love. " Je m'y eschauday 
en mon enf ance, et y souffris toutes les rages 
que les poetes disent advenir a ceux qui s'y 
laissent aller sans ordre et sans jugement." 
" And truly, in my youth I suffered much 
extremity for love ; very near this." Mon- 
taigne, Polonius, is your knowledge of life 
no greater than of these matters ? 

Montaigne had a wife who had no part 
in " toutes les rages." One day, when he 
was carried home to all appearances dead, 
he was met by " ceux de ma famille, avec 
les cris accoustumez en telles choses." He 



290 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

had children. They died, and he says : " I 
lost two or three at nurse, if not without 
regret, at least without repining. . . . The 
generality of men think it a great blessing 
to have many children ; I, and some others, 
think it as happy to be without them." The 
Huguenots give up peace, content, worldly 
prosperity, health, and friends for an idea, 
and they vex him with their nonconformist 
nonsense. Is not Paris worth a mass? Is 
not peace more than the absence of branched 
candlesticks ? The Catholics die for love of 
the habit of ages, for tradition, for the divin- 
ity in asceticism ; and Montaigne professes 
to be of their faith, he too has their reli- 
gion. He is surrounded by soldiers ; what to 
him are the big wars, the plumed troops, the 
neighing steed, the spirit-stirring drum? 

I put Montaigne hastily back under his 
blanket and paddled hard, chanting songs of 
America. That night I reached Westport. 
Lake Champlain is too big for a canoe ; it 
is so wide that unless you hug the indented 
shore you lose the pleasure of an ever shift- 
ing scene. The steamboats shake the water 
most immoderately. The only way to en- 
counter their swell is to meet it bow on, and 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 291 

lift the boat over the crest of each roll with 
a downward stroke of the paddle. At West- 
port I got aboard the " Chateaugay," and dis- 
embarked about noon at a point on the east 
side of the lake, opposite Plattsburg. There 
I had a very good dinner. It is not far 
thence to the border. The lake sluggishly 
glides into the river Richelieu. Never was a 
less appropriate christening ; for a meeker, 
duller, feebler river it were hard to imagine. 
I had had thoughts of a lively current hur- 
rying me along, but for the life of me I 
could not tell which way the river was run- 
ning. Running, I say, but there was no 
more run than Richelieu in this river, except 
down a certain rocky declivity, several miles 
long, where the water, much against its will, 
gives little automatic, jerky jumps, bumping 
along till it reaches level again. The first 
night on the river I passed at Rouse's Point. 
Nothing but Montaigne could have enabled 
me to free myself from the oppression of 
the dining-room, bedroom, guests, and hotel 
clerk. None but Jeremiah could live there. 
I had to pay four dollars for the discomforts 
of the night. Extortion should be resisted ; 
but " there is nothing I hate more than driv- 



292 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

ing of bargaines : it is a meere commerce of 
dodging and impudencie. After an hour's 
debating and paltring, both parties will goe 
from their words and oaths for the getting 
or saving of a shilling." 

The river Richelieu has its defects and its 
virtues. Its chief defect, and a monstrous 
one when days are hot and no wind blows, 
is that it has no pool, no hollow, no recess, 
for a bath. Bushes, lily-pads, water-docks, 
and darnels, all manner of slimy herbs range 
in unbroken ranks all along the sides. To 
take a jump from the canoe in the middle 
of the river is a facile feat, " sed revocare 
gradum, hie labor est." I poked along for 
hours, examining every spot that looked as 
if a pebbled bottom might He underneath, 
but found nothing, until I saw a tiny rivulet, 
so little that it would take ten minutes to fill 
a bathtub, trickling down a bank steeper than 
ordinary. Here the oozy greenery parted 
respectfully and left an open path for the 
little brook to make head into the river. 
One step from the shore the bottom sunk 
two fathoms deep. I tried to mark the spot 
on my map for the sake of future travelers ; 
but there was no indication of its place ; not 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 293 

even the little house across the river was 
noted, the presence of which, perhaps, should 
have disturbed me. 

The virtues of the Richelieu are those of 
the people past whose houses it flows, if those 
aggregates of roofs, walls, and chimneys 
can be called houses. In New England a 
house implies a family, — father and mother, 
children, chickens, and live creatures in gen- 
eral. These houses have bare existence, no 
more. Not a man is to be seen. The flat 
fields spread far away on either side, and 
there are signs of tillage, also pastures ten- 
anted by pigs. Along the river runs a road, 
and at intervals of half a mile little un- 
painted houses with closed doors and shut 
windows stand square-toed upon it. Once 
or twice I saw a woman sewing or knitting 
on the doorstep, her back turned ; and I 
would paddle nearer and strike my paddle a 
little more noisily for the sake of a bonjour, 
or at least of a look with a suggestion of 
interest or human curiosity. The backs re- 
mained like so many Ladies of Shalott fear- 
ful of consequences. Perhaps they could 
see me in a mirror, perhaps there had been 
a time when they used to look ; but the river 



294 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

had been so unremunerative that now no 
splash, how noisy soever, could provoke a 
turn of the head. It was the land of Nod. 
Some children I saw, but voiceless children, 
playing drowsy games or sleepily driving 
sleeping pigs afield. Bitten with curiosity 
and afraid to drink the river's water, I went 
up to one of these houses at noontide. I 
made a half circle to the back, and found a 
door open. In the kitchen sat two women, 
an old man, and one or two children ; the 
women busy sewing, the old man braiding a 
mat from long strips of colored cloth. They 
all looked up at me and called to the dog, 
which had shown more interest in me than 
I cared for. One of the defects of the 
Kichelieu is its dogs. Never were there such 
dogs. Dogs by courtesy, for they have legs, 
tail, head, ears, and if you go near, they 
growl, their hair bristles, and their tails point 
stiffly to the ground ; but they are not the 
dogs honest folks are wont to meet, — mere 
gargoyles cast in animated clay. They fetch 
their hide from long-haired dogs, Scotch 
perhaps, their tails from English bulls, their 
throats from hounds, their snouts from point- 
ers, their forepaws from dachshunds, their 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 295 

hind legs from Spitz, their teeth from jack- 
als; their braying, harking, snarling voices 
are all their own. 

" Bon jour," said I, after the dog had lain 
down. " Voulez-vous avoir la bonte de me 
donner du lait, madame?" The children 
stared as before ; the women looked at each 
other, and then at me. I repeated my ques- 
tion, hat in hand. They still stared. " J'ai 
soif," I continued ; " Feau du fleuve est 
d'une telle couleur que j'en ai peur." A 
light broke over the old man's face ; one 
of the women questioned him. " II veut du 
lac." "Ah, du lac," and they all smiled, 
and then clouded up, looking dubious. " Je 
veux en acheter," said I intelligently. " Ah, 
il veut en acheter. C'est bien," and the 
older woman shouted for Jacques. A round- 
faced young man clambered down a ladder 
from the attic above the cattle-sheds, and 
presently brought me some very good milk, 
with which I filled my pail and departed. 
As I paddled off I looked back to see who 
was watching me, making sure that at least 
a child or the dog would have sufficient curi- 
osity to see the last of me. Not a sign ; the 
house stared indifferently at the water. 



296 'A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

I passed one night at St. Johns, which 
stands at the southern end of the canal. 
The canal runs for twelve miles past the 
Chambly Rapids, the same that vexed Samuel 
Champlain when he made his first voyage of 
discovery, coming down from Mont Real to 
punish the Iroquois and to see what he could 
see. The lying Algonquins, in their eager- 
ness to have his company, had told him that 
there was no obstacle for the canoes. In 
this town I lodged in a French inn. The 
host was large and portly, — somewhat too 
much given to looking like the innkeeper in 
Dore's " Don Quixote," but a very good fel- 
low. There is red wine in his cellar, and his 
wife cooks omelets with golden-brown tops. 

Montaigne is sometimes held up as the 
type of the man of the world. It may be 
that he is such, but for those of us who are 
somewhat abashed at so fine a title, who have 
been taught to consider a man of the world 
as a hireling of the Prince of this World, and 
prefer to cope with a man of our hundred, 
the name may carry them into error. It is 
true that Montaigne went to Paris while 
Catherine de' Medici and her sons held their 
court, and to Venice while the fame of Le- 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 297 

panto still hung over the Adriatic ; but he 
did not become a man of the world, suppos- 
ing that traveling to the worldly cities of the 
world can so fashion a man. He judges 
them like a man with a comfortable home in 
the country. " Ces belles villes, Venise et 
Paris, alterent la faveur que je leur porte, par 
l'aigre senteur, Tune de son marets, l'autre de 
sa boue." In Venice there had been a man 
of the world, Pietro Aretino, called Divine by 
his compatriots, " in whom except it be an 
high-raised, proudly pufft, mind-moving and 
heart-danting manner of speech, yet in good 
sooth more than ordinarie, wittie and ingen- 
ious ; but so new f angled, so extravagant, so 
fantastical!, so deep-laboured ; and to con- 
clud, besides the eloquence, which be it as it 
may be, I cannot perceive anything in it, be- 
yond or exceeding that of many other writers 
of his age, much lesse that it in any sort ap- 
proacheth that ancient divinitie.' , One sus- 
pects that it was not lack of style in Aretino 
that repelled Montaigne, but the superabun- 
dance of his disgusting nature. A man of 
the world does not have likes and dislikes ; 
he has amusements and interests, excitements 
even, ennui, tedium, and vacuity. This aver- 



298 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

sion from Aretino betrays Montaigne. He 
would conceal it as a mere pricking of his 
literary thumbs, but the truth will out. There 
was not lurking in Montaigne's closet any 
skeleton of satiety. That is the mark of the 
man of the world. Not abroad, but in his 
chateau, in his study on the third story of 
the tower, is Montaigne at his ease. The 
world comes to him there, but what world? 
This terrestrial globe peopled with ignorance 
and knowledge, custom and freedom, "cap- 
tive good " and " captain ill," where Guise 
and Navarre break the peace in all the baili- 
wicks of France ? By no means. It is Plu- 
tarch's world, a novel world of Greeks and 
Latins, more like Homer's world than an- 
other, where princes and heroes perform 
their exploits from some Seaman der to the 
sea and back again. Plutarch was his ency- 
clopaedia of interest. The man of the world 
watches the face of the world, walking to 
and fro to see what there may be abroad. 
Not so Montaigne. He cares little for the 
contemporary world of fact, even for the 
city of Bordeaux, his charge. Plutarch for 
him ; and what had Plutarch to do with the 
harvests and vintages of Bordeaux, with Gas- 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 299 

con deaths and Gascon burials, with mar- 
riages and children, with drawing water and 
baking bread, with Ave Marias and Sunday 
holidays ? The heroic, the superhuman, the 
accomplishment of aspirations and hopes, — 
these are the domain of Plutarch and also of 
Romance. Montaigne would not have liked 
to be dubbed romantic, and clearly he was 
not ; yet the glance and glitter of Romance 
caught the fancy of this late child of the Re- 
naissance. It is said that the ebb tide of the 
new birth tumbled him over in its waves and 
left him lying on the wet sands of disillu- 
sion. If this be so, why did he seek and get 
the citizenship of Rome ? Was it not that 
" Civis Romanus sum " was one of the great 
permanent realities to his imagination ? Why 
is it that he fills his pages with the romance 
of Alexander, Scipio, and Socrates ? Why 
do the records of fearlessness facing death, 
of the stoic suffering the ills of life with a 
smile, of men doing deeds that surpass the 
measure of a man's strength, drag him to 
them? He will not have his heroes belit- 
tled. " Moreover, our judgments are but 
sick, and follow after the corruption of our 
manners. I see the greater part of the wits 



300 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

of my time puzzle their brains to draw a 
cloud over the glory of the noble and gener- 
ous feats of old — grande subtilite" The 
spirit of the Renaissance that wrought by 
land and sea in his father's time still lin- 
gered. How could a man of letters escape 
the spirit of freedom and belief in possi- 
bility that the lack of geography and the 
babyhood of science spread thick over Eu- 
rope ? To the west lay America and mys- 
tery. From the east news might come to- 
morrow that the men of Asia were masters 
of Vienna. From the spire of Bordeaux 
Cathedral a mayor standing a-tiptoe might 
see the cut of Drake's jib as he sailed up 
the Gironde. Romance impregnated the air. 
Into France, reformation, classic lore, the 
arts of Italy, were come at double-quick, and 
to the south, in a certain place in La Mancha, 
El Senor Quixada, or Quesada, gave himself 
over to reading books of knight-errantry 
with so much zeal that he clean forgot to 
go a-hunting, and even to attend to his pro- 
perty ; in fact, this gentleman's curiosity and 
nonsense in this matter reached such a pitch 
that he sold many an acre of cornfields in 
order to buy books of knight-errantry. Mon- 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 301 

taigne had too much of Polonius to behave 
in that way ; nevertheless, the desire to reach 
out beyond the chalk -line drawn by the 
senses was potent with him. He goes round 
and round a subject not merely to show how 
no progress can be made towards discover- 
ing the inner reality of it, but partly to see 
if he cannot discover something. The make- 
weights that kept him steadfast in sobriety 
were his curiosity and his wit. Wit is the 
spirit that ties a man's leg. It cannot abide 
half-lights, shadows, and darkness. Wit must 
deal with the immediate, with the plat of 
ground round which it paces its intellectual 
circuit. Wit has a lanthorn, which sheds 
its beams, revealing unexpected knowledge, 
but it turns the twilight beyond that circle 
of light into darkness. Ariosto's wit makes 
his verses, but bars him from poetry. Spen- 
ser's lack of wit allows him to make poetry, 
but shuts him out from readers. Shake- 
speare and Cervantes were great enough to 
dominate their wit, but Montaigne's clasped 
hands with his curiosity, and the two led him 
as the dog leads a blind man. The instinct 
in them has guided him to immortality. In 
curiosity Montaigne was of his father's time. 



302 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

Curiosity was one of the makers of the Re- 
naissance. It has not the graces of resigna- 
tion and of contemplation, it lacks the self- 
respect of belief and the self-sufficiency of 
unbelief, but it accomplishes more than they, 
it must be reckoned with. It is the force 
underlying science. It is the grand vizier of 
change. Curiosity whispered to Columbus, 
plucked Galileo by the sleeve, and shook the 
apple off Newton's apple-tree. Montaigne 
was a curious man. The English language 
lacks nicety in not having two words for the 
two halves of curiosity : one for Francis Ba- 
con, one for my landlady's neighbor, she that 
lives behind us to the left, whose window 
commands our yard. But if there were, 
could we apply the nobler adjective to Mon- 
taigne ? Does he want to know, like Ulysses ? 
Will he to ocean in an open boat, 

" yearning in desire 
To follow knowledge like a sinking star " ? 

Or does he rest content with the ordinary 
wares of knowledge, sold in market overt, 
and is he satisfied with ruminating over 
them, hands in pockets, leaving others to 
buy and use ? 

The placidity of his life is another proof 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 303 

of his fondness for romance. A man of the 
world must go out into the world to seek the 
motion and the tap-tap of the free play of 
life, in order to satisfy the physical needs of 
sight and sound. The man of imagination 
and romance sits in his study, and heroes, 
heroines, gryphons, and Ganelons come hud- 
dling about his chair. To Montaigne the 
world came through his books, yet he is not 
a representative scholar. His companionship 
with books is based on friendship, not on 
desire for knowledge. There is no latent 
Faust in him. He is a man of the library. 
Of all great men of letters, more than the 
rest he has his writing-table backgrounded 
and shut in by bookshelves. Cicero is a man 
of the forum, Voltaire of the theatre, Walter 
Scott of hill and dale. Montaigne is at home 
with books, not with men. Of the former, 
his cronies are Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero, 
Horace. He cares not so much about states 
and policies as he does how states long dead 
and policies forgotten appear to philosopher 
and poet. He is indifferent to morals as 
affecting the happiness of men, and eagerly 
interested in them as a topic of conversation, 
as an occasion whereby opinion may take 



304 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

the foils against opinion, and thought click 
against its fellow. Nor is he fond of poetry 
except as it serves to embroider his mono- 
logues. Life itself interests him chiefly as a 
matter for talk. And how good his talk is, 
how excellent his speech ! With his heart, 
or what of heart he had, in his books, it 
is natural that he wished to appear among 
men of letters in his best array. He was 
ambitious, when men thenceforward should 
read Cicero and Seneca, that Michel de Mon- 
taigne should be read too, and that his style 
should stand beside theirs, uncovered, par 
inter pares, Sainte-Beuve, making mention 
of Calvin, Rabelais, Pascal, and Montaigne, 
says that Rabelais and Montaigne are poets. 
But Montaigne clearly does not fill an Eng- 
lish-speaking man's conception of a poet. It 
must be, I think, that Sainte-Beuve was un- 
der the influence of Montaigne's language, 
and therefore called him so. That was nat- 
ural. The French tongue at that time had 
a strong element of poetry; it bore deep 
marks of its originals. It had not yet come 
under the complete dominion of narrow pros- 
ody and syntax. The words had in a mea- 
sure the simplicity, the indecision of outline, 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 305 

the rude strength, of the Teutonic languages. 
Old English words, at times, like conspira- 
tors, come fraught with greater meaning 
that they are indistinct; their shadows fall 
about them, hiding their feet ; they glide 
into your presence : so it is with Montaigne's 
words. Nowadays French words have evolu- 
tions and drills, accepted manoeuvres ; they 
savor of mathematics and bloodless things. 
The French language of to-day has altered 
its sixteenth-century habit more than Eng- 
lish has ; no Bible arrested its development. 
Montaigne has the simplicity, the directness 
of expression and exposition, of the men of 
to-day, but the poetical quality that lurks in 
his words and phrases they have not inher- 
ited. 

At St. Johns is the custom house, but the 
office was locked at a reasonable hour in the 
morning for calling, and I felt under no fur- 
ther obligations towards the Canadian gov- 
ernment. Here also is the place to pay the 
canal toll, and in exchange receive a ticket 
which gives permission to pass all the locks. 
The toll-taker wrote me out a permit, full 
of dignity, authorizing the ship Sickle-Fin, 
weighing not more than one ton, whereof 



306 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

Captain , naming me, was the master, 

laden with ballast (Montaigne), to travel free 
through all the locks. 

It is the every-day humanity in Montaigne 
that binds us to him. It is his lack of capa- 
city for self-sacrifice, his inability to believe, 
his ignorance of love, his innocence of scorn. 
These are our common property. He likes 
the comforts that we like ; he values secur- 
ity, ease, simplicity, a fire on the hearth, a 
book in the hand, fresh water in summer. 
He never makes us ashamed. 

The next night I passed at Beloeil. Here 
I was the sport of indecision for an hour, 
unable to make up my mind where to pass 
the night. There were three hotels, two on 
my left, one on my right. While looking at 
each in turn, I resolved to go to one of the 
other two. Finally I made my choice. I 
selected a little wooden house, with a little 
bar-room, a little dining-room, and a very 
tiny larder, and beer of a despicable quality. 
I had ham and eggs for dinner, — " Si Ton 
avait su que Monsieur allait venir, on aurait 
pu avoir un bifteck," — ham and eggs for 
breakfast, and an offer to put up ham and 
eggs for my lunch. 



A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 307 

The villages along the river are all on one 
pattern. In the centre is a very large church, 
so big that you see it far off, long before 
there is any other indication of human life. 
The church is built on a rectangle, with a 
pointed roof and a tall spire tipped with a 
weather-cock. The roof is covered with tin, 
unpainted, which does not rust, perhaps be- 
cause the air is so dry, and flashes very 
gaudily in the sun. Grouped about the 
church are large red brick buildings facing 
a little green. These are the houses for 
priests and nuns, with the offices for parish 
work. Images of the Virgin and saints 
stand about. The grass-plot and the paths 
are well kept, and were it not that the rest 
of the village does not seem to share in this 
prosperity, it would be a very pleasant sight. 
At St. Ours, where I passed the next night, 
there was an attractive house, shut in by a 
garden and well protected by trees, that had 
the look of accumulated savings ; but in gen- 
eral there was little sign of the comforts so 
often seen in the small manufacturing vil- 
lages of New England, — no sound of a 
lawn-mower, no croquet, no tennis. 

The river Richelieu joins the St. Law- 



308 A HOLIDAY WITH MONTAIGNE 

rence at Sorel. There I found that the St. 
Lawrence is too big and strong for a canoe, 
at least when paddled in a jogging, unso- 
phisticated way. I put my canoe aboard the 
steamer, and bought a ticket for Quebec. 
In my stuffy cabin, under the dim gaslight, 
I admired Montaigne's imperturbability and 
his ceaseless interest in things. 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 



Twenty years ago, at Harvard College, 
in the rooms of all students of certain social 
pretensions who affected books, you were 
sure to see on the most conspicuous shelf, in 
green and gold or in half calf, the works of 
William Makepiece Thackeray. The name, 
boldly printed, greeted you as you entered 
the door, and served, together with sundry 
red-sealed certificates and beribboned silver 
medals, to inform you of the general respec- 
tability and gentility of your host. Of a 
Sunday morning, this student was likely to 
be discovered complacent over the " Book of 
Snobs " or serious over " Vanity Fair." 

Public opinion went that Thackeray was 
the novelist of gentlemen and for gentlemen ; 
that Dickens was undoubtedly strong, but he 
had not had the privilege of knowing and 
of delineating the things which were adapted 
to interest the most select of Harvard under- 



312 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

graduates. In every fold there are some to 
lower the general standard of critical excel- 
lence ; there were some partisans of Dickens. 
They were judged, as minorities are, found 
guilty of running counter to accepted opin- 
ions, and outlawed from further literary criti- 
cism. 

These Harvard critics did not make for 
themselves this opinion of Thackeray ; they 
brought it with them from home. 

We suppose that parents, what time their 
son started in the world on the first path 
which diverged from theirs, deemed that 
they were equipping him with the best mas- 
ter to teach him concerning the ways of that 
world. Theirs was the old lack of faith, 
so common to the fearful ; they sought to 
guard their son from the world by pointing 
out to him its vanity, its folly, its emptiness. 
" Oh, if he shall only know what the world 
is," they thought, " he will escape its evils to 
come." So they gave him Thackeray, and 
wrote him long letters on idleness and vice. 
His bookshelves and his inner pockets thus 
encumbered, the youth found Harvard Col- 
lege a miniature of the world of which he 
had been warned. There were materials 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 313 

enough for such a conclusion. A seeker 
will find what he goes forth to seek. The 
youth learned his Thackeray well, spent four 
years enjoying his little Vanity Fair, and 
then departed from Cambridge to help build 
up the larger world of Vanity which shows so 
fine in America to-day. 

There is no phenomenon so interesting as 
the unconscious labor of boys and men over 
the task of shaping, hewing, whittling, and 
moulding the world into accord with their 
anticipations. All lend helping hands to the 
great master implement, public expectation. 
A young fellow goes to college, and joins a 
group of a dozen others. Brown, the rake, 
thinks, " Here 's a Lothario who will sup at 
Dame Quickly's with me ; " Smith, the boxer, 
says, " A quick eye, — I '11 make a boxer of 
him ; " Jones, who translates Homer for the 
group, sees rhythm and Theocritus in the 
newcomer's curly hair; Robinson, the phi- 
losopher, feels a fellow Hegelian. These 
rival expectations leap out to meet the stran- 
ger ; they struggle among themselves. Of 
the students, some agree with Brown, some 
with Smith, others with Robinson or Jones. 
The sturdiest of these expectations chokes 



314 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

out the others and survives. After a short 
time — our young fellow yet entirely undis- 
covered — a strong current of unanimous 
expectation has decided that he shall be a 
boxer. All obstacles to the execution of this 
judgment are taken away, and moral earth- 
works are quickly thrown up, guarding him 
from Brown, Jones, and Robinson. Expec- 
tation seats him beside Smith ; expectation 
turns the conversation upon champions of 
the ring ; expectation draws the gloves upon 
his fists; it offers him no Eastcheap, no 
Theocritus, no Hegel. The youth takes box- 
ing lessons ; soon he learns the language of 
the fraternity ; he walks, runs, avoids mince 
pies, eschews books, and with a single eye 
looks forward to a bout in Hemenway Gym- 
nasium. Thus the tricksy spirit expectation 
shapes the destinies of common humankind. 
Thus do parents begin to expect that their son 
will see the world with their own and Thack- 
eray's beam-troubled eyes ; they insist that 
he shall, and in due time he does. 

Once convince a young man that Thack- 
eray's world is the real world, that vulgarity, 
meanness, trickery, and fraud abound, and 
you put him in a yoke from which he shall 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 315 

never free himself. This is the yoke of base 
expectation. This is what is known in Scrip- 
ture as " the world ; " it is the habit of screw- 
ing up the eyes and squinting in order to see 
unworthiness, baseness, vice, and wickedness ; 
it is a creeping blindness to nobler things. 
The weapon against the world is, as of old, 
to use a word of great associations, faith. 
Faith is nothing but noble expectation, and 
all education should be to supplant base ex- 
pectation by noble expectation. What is the 
human world in which we live but a mighty 
mass of sensitive matter, highly susceptible 
to the great force of human expectation, 
which flows about it like an ever shifting 
Gulf Stream, now warming and prospering 
noble people, and then wantonly comforting 
the unworthy ? 

Feeble folk that we are, we have in this 
power of creation an element of divinity in 
us. Our expectations hover about like life- \ 
giving agencies. We are conscious that our 
hopes and our fears are at work all the time 
helping the oncoming of that which we hope 
or fear. The future is like a new born babe 
stretching out its arms to the stronger. It 
may be that this power in us is weak, inter- 



316 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

mittent, often pitiably feeble ; but now and 
again comes a man with a larger measure of 
divine life, and his great expectations pass 
into deeds. Before every Trafalgar first 
comes an expectation that duty will be done. 

Thackeray has no faith ; he does not enter- 
tain high expectations. His characters do 
shameless things, and Thackeray says to the 
reader, " Be not surprised, injured-seeming 
friend ; you would have done the like under 
the like temptation." At first you contra- 
dict, you resent ; but little by little Thacke- 
ray's opinion of you inoculates you ; the virus 
takes; you lose your conviction that you 
would have acted differently ; you concede 
that such conduct was not impossible, even 
for you, — no, nor improbable, — and, on 
the whole, after reflection, that the conduct 
was excusable, was good enough, was justi- 
fied, was inevitable, was right, was scrupu- 
lously right, and only a Don Quixote would 
have acted otherwise. 

Nothing sickens and dies so quickly as 
noble expectation. Luxury, comfort, cus- 
tom, the ennui of hourly exertion, the dint 
of disappointment, assail it unceasingly : if a 
man of ten talents, like Thackeray, joins the 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 317 

assailants, is it not just that admiration of 
him should be confined to those who are 
willing to admire talents, irrespective of the 
use to which they are put ? J 

II 

England has found it hard to bring forth 
men of faith. In the great days of Queen 
Elizabeth, a number of uniting causes pro- 
duced an emotional excitement which lifted 
Englishmen and Englishwomen to such a 
height that Shakespeare saw Othello, Ham- 
let, Brutus, Coriolanus, Miranda, Cordelia. 
There was the material stimulus of commerce 
with strange countries, the prick of money ; 
there was this curious earth, inviting wooers ; 
there was the goad of conscience, troubled 
to renounce the religion of old ; there was 
the danger of foreign conquerors ; there 
was manly devotion to a Virgin Queen. 
England roused herself, and, " like a dew- 
drop from the lion's mane," shook off the 
trammels of petty interests, of vulgar self- 
seeking, and presented to her poet great 
sights of human nobility. Not that the 
moral elevation of a nation is very much 
higher at one time than at another, but a 



318 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

little swelling of noble desires so breaks 
the ice of custom that a poet must see the 
clearer waters which lie beneath. If Shake- 
speare were alive to-day, we doubt not that 
he would tell of new Othellos, new Cordelias ; 
but it was easier for him then than it would 
be now, or how could such a host of noble 
men and women people his pages? 

Since that time England has been pros- 
perous and comfortable ; and as her comfort 
and prosperity have increased she has drifted 
further and further from a great acceptance 
of the world. Dryden and his group, Field- 
ing, Sheridan, men of talents in their differ- 
ent generations, have succeeded, who con- 
template themselves, and, expecting to find 
the world a fit place for them to live in, have 
helped to render it so. 

A hundred years ago England shook her- 
self free from the dominion of vulgar men. 
In France, the triple burden of church, mon- 
arch, and nobility, the prohibition of thought, 
the injustice of power, had lain like mill- 
stones on the people ; each individual had 
borne his own burden, but one after another 
each saw that not he alone groaned and 
sweated, but his brothers also. The fardel a 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 319 

man can bear by himself he can no longer 
carry when he sees an endless line of other 
men weighted down and staggering. Sight 
of injustice to others made each individual in 
France throw off his own yoke ; and the most 
exultant cry of justice, of brotherly love, ever 
heard, was raised. No country lives alone. 
French passion flushed to England. Eng- 
lishmen were roused : some were for liberty ; 
others saw their dull old homes and habits 
transfigured in the blaze of new ideas. Noble 
Kepublicans bred noble Tories. Everything 
was ennobled ; babies looked more beautiful to 
their mothers ; Virgil interested schoolboys ; 
ragamuffins and ploughboys felt strange dis- 
quiet as they heard the words " liberty," 
" country," " brotherhood," " home." This 
shock and counter-shock prepared the way for 
the great poets of that time, and made Wal- 
ter Scott possible. Scott had faith ; he saw 
a noble world. But the idealism of France 
passed away, its glow faded from the English 
cliffs ; danger was locked up in St. Helena, 
and prosperity and comfort, like Gog and 
Magog, stalked through England. 

Thackeray was bred when Englishmen 
were forsaking " swords for ledgers," and de- 



320 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

serting " the student's bower for gold." His 
father died when he was very young. His 
mother married for her second husband an 
Indian officer, and Thackeray was sent to 
school in England. 

In a new biographical edition of Thacke- 
ray's works which Messrs. Harper & Brothers 
are publishing, Mrs. Ritchie has written brief 
memories of her father at the beginning of 
each volume, with special relation to its con- 
tents. These memories are done with filial 
affection. Thackeray's kindness, his tender- 
ness, his sympathetic nature, are written large 
on every page. He has many virtues. He 
dislikes vice, drunkenness, betrayal of women, 
pettifogging, huckstering, lying, cheating, 
knavery, the annoyance and tomfoolery of 
social distinctions. He would like to leave 
the world better than he found it, but 
he cannot see. Pettiness, the vulgarity of 
money, the admiration of mean things, hang 
before him like a curtain at the theatre. Ro- 
meo may be on fire, Hotspur leap for the 
moon, Othello stab Iago, Lear die in Corde- 
lia's lap ; but the sixteenth of an inch of 
frieze and fustian keeps it all from him. 

At nineteen Thackeray spent a winter at 



SOME ASPECTS OF Tl ACKERAY 321 

Weimar. He soon writes to his mother of 
Goethe as " the great lion of Weimar." He 
is not eager to possess the great measures of 
life. He is not sensitive to Goethe, but to 
the court of Pumpernickel. He wishes he 
were a cornet in Sir John Kennaway's yeo- 
manry, that he might wear the yeoman's 
dress. " A yeomanry dress is always a hand- 
some and respectable one." 

In 1838, when in Paris, he writes : " I have 
just come from seeing ' Marion Delorme,' the 
tragedy of Victor Hugo, and am so sickened 
and disgusted with the horrid piece that I 
have hardly heart to write." He did not 
look through pain and extravagance into the 
noble passion of the play. He^ lived in a 
moral Pumpernickel where the ideal is kept 
outside the town gates. And he has de- 
scribed his home with the vividness and 
vigor of complete comprehension. Never 
has a period had so accomplished an his- 
torian. The bourgeoisie have their epic in 
" Vanity Fair." 

This book reflects Thackeray's intellectual 
image in his prime ; it is his first great novel, 
and is filled with the most vivid and enduring 
of his beliefs and convictions. There are in 



322 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

it a vigor, an ina ^pendence, and a sense of 
power that come when a man faces his best 
opportunity. Into it Thackeray has put what 
he deemed the truest experiences of his life. 
" The Newcomes " and " Pendennis " are but 
sequels. " The Newcomes " is the story of 
his stepfather, in Vanity Fair; " Pendennis," 
that of Thackeray himself and his mother 
wandering in its outskirts. There is this 
one family of nice people, gathered into an 
ark as it were, floating over the muddy wa- 
ters. Thackeray was able to see that his 
immediate family were not rogues ; he was 
also able to draw a most noble gentleman, 
Henry Esmond, by the help of the idealizing 
lens of a hundred odd years ; but the world 
he thought he saw about him is the world 
of "Vanity Fair." 

Thackeray had so many fine qualities that 
one cannot but feel badly to see him in such 
a place. Had his virtues — his kindness, 
his tenderness, his charm, his capacity for 
affection — been energetic enough to domi- 
nate his entire character, he would have lived 
among far different scenes ; his readers would 
have beheld him brooding over a world where 
passion may be very noble and very base, 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 323 

happy that virtue, in the strong or in the 
weak, may sometimes be found indomitable, 
and deeply serious, deeply conscious of that 
inner essence in men, which at times has per- 
suaded them to believe themselves children 
of God. Was it Thackeray's fault that this 
was not to be ? Or did he suffer the inci- 
dental misfortunes which large causes bring 
to individuals as they follow their own re- 
gardless paths ? 

in 

Thackeray is the poet of respectability. 
His working time stretches from the Reform 
Act almost to the death of Lord Palmer ston. 
He chronicles the contemporary life of a 
rich, money-getting generation of merchants 
and manufacturers, lifted into sudden impor- 
tance in the national life by steamboats and 
railroads, by machinery for spinning, weav- 
ing, mining, by Arkwright, Watt, Davy, and 
Stephenson. His is a positive, matter-of-fact 
world, of which Peel is the statesman and 
Macaulay the man of letters. Macaulay, in 
his essay on Bacon, has given us the mea- 
sure of its spiritual elevation : " We have 
sometimes thought that an amusing fiction 



324 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

might be written, in which a disciple of Epic- 
tetus and a disciple of Bacon should be in- 
troduced as fellow travelers. They come to 
a village where the smallpox has just begun 
to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse 
suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers 
weeping in terror over their children. The 
Stoic assures the dismayed population that 
there is nothing bad in the smallpox ; and 
that, to a wise man, disease, deformity, death, 
the loss of friends, are not evils. The Ba- 
conian takes out a lancet and begins to vac- 
cinate. They find a body of miners in great 
dismay. An explosion of noisome vapors 
has just killed many of those who were at 
work ; and the survivors are afraid to ven- 
ture into the cavern. The Stoic assures them 
that such an accident is nothing but a mere 
a7ro7rpo7]yn€vov. The Baconian, who has 
no such fine word at his command, contents 
himself with devising a safety-lamp. They 
find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his 
hands on the shore. His vessel, with an in- 
estimable cargo, has just gone down, and he 
is reduced in a moment from opulence to 
beggary. The Stoic exhorts him not to seek 
happiness in things which lie without him- 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 325 

self ; the Baconian constructs a diving-bell. 
It would be easy to multiply illustrations of 
the difference between the philosophy of 
thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the phi- 
losophy of words and the philosophy of 
works." This is the very nobility of ma- 
chinery. As we read, we listen to the buzz 
and whirr of wheels, the drip of oil-cans, the 
creaking and straining of muscle and steel. 
Such things serve, no doubt, in default of 
other agencies, to create a great empire, but 
the England of Thackeray's day was nouveau 
riche, self-made, proud of its lack of occu- 
pation other than money-getting. 

During the formative period of Thack- 
eray's life the English nation was passing 
under the influence of machinery. There 
was the opportunity of a great man of let- 
ters, such as Thackeray, to look to it that 
literature should respond to the stimulus of 
added power, and grow so potent that it 
would determine what direction the national 
life should take. At such a time of national 
expansion, literature should have seen Eng- 
land in the flush of coming greatness ; it 
should have roused itself to re-create her in 
nobler imagination, and have spent itself in 



326 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

making her accept this estimate and expec- 
tation, and become an England dominating 
material advantages and leading the world. 

The interest in life is this potentiality and 
malleability. The allotted task of men and 
women is to take this potentiality and shape 
it. Men who have strong intelligence and 
quick perceptions, like Thackeray, accom- 
plish a great deal in the way of giving a 
definite form to the material with which life 
furnishes us. What Michelangelo says of 
marble is true of lif e : — 

" Non ha l'ottimo artista alcun concetto 
Ch'un marmo solo in se non circoscriva 
Col suo soverchio." 

The problem of life is to uncover the figures 
hiding in this material: shall it be Caliban 
and Circe, or Philip Sidney and Jeanne 
d'Arc? Thackeray, with what Mrs. Ritchie 
calls " his great deal of common sense," saw 
Major Pendennis and Becky Sharp ; and he 
gave more effective cuttings and chiselings 
and form to the potential life of England 
than any other man of his time. 

The common apology for such a novelist 
is that he describes what he sees. This is 
the worst with which we charge him. We 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 327 

charge Thackeray with seeing what he de- 
scribes ; and what justification has a man, in 
a world like this, to spend his time looking 
at Barnes Newcome and Sir Pitt Crawley? 
Thackeray takes the motes and beams float- 
ing in his mind's eye for men and women, 
writes about them, and calls his tale a his- 
tory. 

Thackeray wrote, on finishing " Vanity 
Fair," that all the characters were odious 
except Dobbin. Poor Thackeray, what a 
world to see all about him, with his tender, 
affectionate nature ! Even Colonel New- 
come is so crowded round by a mob of ras- 
cally fellows that it is hard to do justice to 
Thackeray's noblest attempt to be a poet. 
But why see a world, and train children to 
see a world, where 

" The great man is a vulgar clown " ? 

A world with such an unreal standard must 
be an unreal world. In the real world vul- 
gar clowns are not great men. Thackeray 
sees a world all topsy-turvy, and it does not 
occur to him that he, and not the world, is 
at fault. This is the curse of faithlessness. 
He himself says, " The world is a looking- 



328 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

glass, and gives back to every man the reflec- 
tion of his own face." 

Thackeray has been praised as a master 
of reality. As reality is beyond our ken, 
the phrase is unfortunate; but the signifi- 
cance of it is that if a man will portray to 
the mob the world with which the mob is 
familiar, they will huzza themselves hoarse. 
Has not the Parisian mob shouted for Zola ? 
Do not the Madrilenos cheer V aides? Do 
not Ouida and the pale youth of Rome and 
Paris holla, " d'Annunzio ! d'Annunzio ! " 
There is no glory here. The poet, not in 
fine frenzy, but in sober simplicity, tells the 
mob, not what they see, but what they can- 
not of themselves perceive, with such a tone 
of authority that they stand gaping and like- 
wise see. 

Thackeray's love of reality was merely an 
embodiment of the popular feeling which 
proposed to be direct, business-like, and not 
to tolerate any nonsense. People felt that a 
money-getting country must take itself seri- 
ously. The Reform Act had brought political 
control to the bourgeoisie, men of common 
sense ; no ranters, no will-o'-the-wisp chasers, 
but "burgomasters and great oneyers," — men 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 329 

who thought very highly of circumstances 
under which they were prosperous, and asked 
for no more beautiful sight than their own 
virtues. Influenced by the sympathetic touch 
of this atmosphere, novel-readers found their 
former favorites old-fashioned. Disraeli, 
Samuel Warren, Bulwer Lytton, G. P. K. 
James, seemed false, theatrical, and senti- 
mental. Thackeray was of this opinion, 
and he studied the art of caricature as the 
surest means of saving himself from any 
such fantastic nonsense. He approached life 
as a city man, — one who was convinced that 
the factories of London, not the theories of 
the philosopher, were the real motive force 
underneath all the busy flow of outward life. 
He found his talents exactly suited to this 
point of view. His memory was an enormous 
wallet, into which his hundred-handed obser- 
vation was day and night tossing scraps and 
bits of daily experience. He saw the meet- 
ings of men as he passed : lords, merchants, 
tinsmiths, guardsmen, tailors, cooks, valets, 
nurses, policemen, boys, applewomen, — 
everybody whom you meet of a morning be- 
tween your house and your office in the city. 
He remarked the gestures, he heard the 



330 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

words, he guessed what had gone before, he 
divined what would happen thereafter : and 
each sight, sound, guess, and divination was 
safely stowed away. England of the forties, 
as Thackeray saw it, is in "Vanity Fair," 
" Pendennis," and "The Newcomes." "I 
ask you to believe," he says in the preface 
to " Pendennis," " that this person writing 
strives to tell the truth." 

Where lies the truth ? Are men merely 
outward parts of machinery, exposed to view, 
while down below in the engine-room steam 
and electricity determine their movements? 
Or do men live and carry on their daily rou- 
tine under the influence of some great 
thought of which they are half unconscious, 
but by which they are shaped, moulded, and 
moved ? A French poet says : — 

" Le vrai Dieu, le Dieu fort, est le Dieu des ide'es." 

But Macaulay says that the philosophy of 
Plato began with words and ended with 
words ; that an acre in Middlesex is better 
than a principality in Utopia. The Brit- 
ish public applauded Macaulay, and young 
Thackeray took the hint. 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 331 

rv 

Nobody can question Thackeray's style. 
His fame is proof of its excellence. Even if 
a man will flatter the mob by saying that he 
sees what they see, he cannot succeed with- 
out skill of expression. Readers are slow 
to understand. They need grace, pithy sen- 
tences, witty turns of phrase, calculated sweep 
of periods and paragraphs. They must have 
no labor of attention ; the right adjective 
alone will catch their eyes ; they require 
their pages plain, clear, perspicuous. In all 
these qualities Thackeray is very nearly per- 
fect. Hardly anybody would say that there 
is a novel better written than " Vanity Fair." 
The story runs as easily as the hours. Chap- 
ter after chapter in the best prose carries the 
reader comfortably on. Probably this excel- 
lence is due to Thackeray's great powers of 
observation. His eyes saw everything, sav- 
ing for the blindness of his inward eye, and 
his memory held it. He was exceedingly 
sensitive. Page after page is filled with the 
vividness of well-chosen detail. He culti- 
vated the art of writing most assiduously. 
From 1830 to 1847, when " Vanity Fair," 



332 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

the first of his great novels, was published, 
he was writing all the time, and for almost 
all of that time as a humorist, drawing cari- 
catures, — a kind of writing perhaps better 
adapted than any other to cultivate the power 
of portraying scenes. The caricaturist is re- 
stricted to a few lines; his task does not 
allow him to fill in, to amplify ; he must say 
his say in little. The success of wit is the 
arrangement of a dozen words. This training 
for sixteen continuous years taught Thack- 
eray a style which, for his subjects, has no 
equal in English literature. 

To-day we greatly admire Stevenson and 
Kipling. We applaud Stevenson's style for 
its cultivation and its charm ; we heap praises 
upon Kipling's for its dash, vigor, and accu- 
racy of detail. All these praises are deserved ; 
but when we take up Thackeray again, we 
find pages and pages written in a style 
more cultivated than Stevenson's and equally 
charming, and with a dash, vigor, and nicety 
of detail that Kipling might envy. Descrip- 
tions that would constitute the bulk of an 
essay for the one, or of a story for the other, 
do hasty service as prologues to Thackeray's 
chapters. Conversations of a happy theatri- 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 333 

cal turn, with enough exaggeration to appear 
wholly natural, which Stevenson and Kipling 
never have rivaled, come crowding together 
in his long novels. 

There are two famous scenes which are 
good examples of Thackeray's power, — one 
of his sentiment, one of his humor. The first 
is Colonel Newcome's death in the Charter- 
house. The second is the first scene between 
Pendennis and the Fotheringay. " Pen tried 
to engage her in conversation about poetry 
and about her profession. He asked her 
what she thought of Ophelia's madness, and 
whether she was in love with Hamlet or not. 
i In love with such a little ojus wretch as that 
stunted manager of a Bingley ? ' She bris- 
tled with indignation at the thought. Pen 
explained it was not of her he spoke, but 
of Ophelia of the play. c Oh, indeed ; if no 
offense was meant, none was taken : but as 
for Bingley, indeed, she did not value him, 
— not that glass of punch.' Pen next tried 
her on Kotzebue. ' Kotzebue ? Who was 
he ? ' ( The author of the play in which she 
had been performing so admirably.' ' She 
did not know that — the man's name at the 
beginning of the book was Thompson,' she 



334 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

said. Pen laughed at her adorable simpli- 
city. He told her of the melancholy fate 
of the author of the play, and how Sand had 
killed him. . . . ' How beautiful she is ! ' 
thought Pen, cantering homewards. 'How 
simple and how tender ! How charming it 
is to see a woman of her genius busying her- 
self with the humble offices of domestic life, 
cooking dishes to make her old father com- 
fortable, and brewing him drink ! How rude 
it was of me to begin to talk about profes- 
sional matters, and how well she turned the 
conversation ! . . . Pendennis, Pendennis, — 
how she spoke the word ! Emily, Emily ! how 
good, how noble, how beautiful, how perfect, 
she is ! ' " 

This scene is very close upon farce, and it 
is in that borderland that Thackeray's ex- 
traordinary skill shows itself most conspicu- 
ous. Difficult, however, as it must be to be 
a master there, — and the fact that Thack- 
eray has no rival in this respect proves it, — 
it is easy work compared to drawing a scene 
of real love, of passion. Perhaps some ac- 
tions of Lady Castlewood are Thackeray's 
only attempt thereat. The world of passion 
is not his world. His ear is not attuned to 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 335 

" Das tiefe, schmerzenvolle Gliick 
Des Hasses Kraft, die Macht der Liebe." 

Charlotte Bronte, Tourguenef, Hawthorne, 
Hugo, Balzac, all excel him. Thackeray 
hears the click of custom against custom, the 
throb of habit, the tick-tick of vulgar life, 
all the sounds of English social machinery. 
What interests him is the relation that Harry 
Foker or Blanche Amory bears to the stan- 
dard of social excellence accepted by com- 
mercial England in the forties. He is never 
— at least as an artist — disturbed by any 
scheme of metaphysics. His English com- 
mon sense is never lured afield by any specu- 
lations about the value of a human being 
uncolored by the shadows of time and space. 
He is never troubled by doubts of standards, 
by skepticism as to uses, ends, purposes ; he 
has a hard-and-fast British standard. He 
draws Colonel Newcome as an object of 
pity ; he surrounds him with tenderness and 
sympathy. Here is Thackeray at his highest. 
But he never suggests to the reader that 
Colonel Newcome is not a man to be pitied, 
but to be envied ; not a failure, but a suc- 
cess ; not unhappy, but most fortunate. The 
great poets of the world have turned the 



336 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

malefactor's cross into the symbol of holi- 
ness. Thackeray never departs from the 
British middle class conceptions of triumph 
and failure. In all his numerous disserta- 
tions and asides to the reader, he wrote like 
the stalwart Briton he was, good, generous, 
moral, domestic, stern, and tender. You 
never forget his Puritan ancestry, you can 
rely upon his honesty ; but he is not pure- 
minded or humble. He dislikes wrong, but 
he never has a high enough conception of 
right to hate wrong. His view is that it is a 
matter to be cured by policemen, propriety, 
and satire. 

Satire is the weapon of the man at odds 
with the world and at ease with himself. 
The dissatisfied man — a Juvenal, a Swift, 
a youthful Thackeray — belabors the world 
with vociferous indignation, like the wind 
on the traveler's back, the beating makes 
it hug its cloaking sins the tighter. Wrong 
runs no danger from such chastisement. The 
fight against wrong is made by the man dis- 
contented with himself and careless of the 
world. Satire is harmless as a moral weapon. 
It is an old-fashioned fowling piece, fit for a 
man of wit, intelligence, and a certain limited 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 337 

imagination. It runs no risk of having no ) 
quarry ; the world to it is one vast covert of 
lawful game. It goes a-traveling with wit, 
because both are in search of the unworthy J 
It is well suited to a brilliant style. It is 
also a conventional department in literature, 
and as such is demanded by publishers and 
accepted by the public. 

Thackeray was born with dexterity of ob- v 
servation, nimbleness of wit, and a quick 
sense of the incongruous and the grotesque. 
He lost his fortune when a young man. He 
wrote for a livelihood, and naturally turned 
to that branch of literature which was best 
suited to his talents. It was his misfortune 
that satire is bad for a man's moral develop- 
ment. It intensified his natural disbelief in 
the worth of humanity, but gave him the 
schooling that enabled him to use his powers 
so brilliantly. v 

Thackeray was often hampered by this 
habit of looking at the grotesque side of 
things. It continually dragged him into 
farce, causing feebleness of effect where there 
should have been power. Sir Pitt Crawley, 
Jos Sedley, the struggle over Miss Crawley, 
Harry Foker, the Chevalier de Florae, Aunt 



338 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

Hoggerty, are all in the realm of farce. This 
is due partly to Thackeray's training, and 
partly to his attitude toward life. If life 
consists of money, clothes, and a bundle of 
social relations, our daily gravity, determina- 
tion, and vigor are farcical, because they are 
so out of place ; they are as incongruous as 
a fish in trousers. But Thackeray forgets 
that there is something disagreeable in this 
farce, as there would be in looking into 
Circe's sty and seeing men groveling over 
broken meats. To be sure, Thackeray makes 
believe that he finds it comic to see crea- 
tures of great pretensions busy themselves so 
continually with the pettiest things. But it 
too often seems as if the comic element con- 
sisted in our human pretensions, and as if 
Thackeray merely kept bringing them to the 
reader's notice for the sake of heightening 
the contrast between men and their doings. 

V 
Thackeray is not an innovator ; he follows 
the traditions of English literature. He is in 
direct descent from the men of the " Specta- 
tor," Addison, Steele, and their friends, and 
from Fielding. He has far greater powers 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 339 

of observation, wit, humor, sentiment, and 
description than the " Spectator " group. He 
excels Fielding in everything except as a 
story-teller, and in a kind of intellectual 
power that is more easily discerned in Field- 
ing than described, — a kind of imperious 
understanding that breaks down a path be- 
fore it, whereas Thackeray's intelligence 
looks in at a window or peeps through the 
keyhole. Fielding is the bigger, coarser 
man of the two ; Thackeray is the cleverer. 
Each is thoroughly English. Fielding em- 
bodies the England of George I. ; Thack- 
eray, that same England refined by the re- 
volutionary ideas of 1789, trained by long 
wars, then materialized by machinery, by a 
successful bourgeoisie, and the quick acces- 
sion of wealth. Each is a good fellow, — 
quick in receiving ideas, but slow to learn a 
new point of view. Fielding is inferior to 
Thackeray in education, in experience of 
many men, and in foreign travel. Tom 
Jones is the begetter of Arthur Pendennis, 
Jonathan Wild of Barry Lyndon. Some of 
Fielding's heroines, wandering out of " Tom 
Jones " and " Amelia," have strayed into 
" Pendennis," "Vanity Fair," and "The 



340 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

Newcomes." The fair emigrees change their 
names, but keep their thoughts and be- 
havior. 

It is said that a lady once asked Thack- 
eray why he made all his women fools or 
knaves. " Madam, I know no others." It 
may be that living in Paris in his youth hurt 
his insight into women ; it may be that the 
great sorrow of his wife's insanity instinc- 
tively turned his thoughts from the higher 
types of women ; perhaps his life in Bohemia 
and in clubs limited his knowledge during 
the years when novel-writing was his chief 
occupation. The truth seems to be that 
Thackeray, like Fielding, was a man's man, 
— he understood one cross-section of a com- 
mon man, his hopes, aims, fears, wishes, 
habits, and manners ; but he was very igno- 
rant of women. He says: "Desdemona was 
not angry with Cassio, though there is very 
little doubt she saw the lieutenant's partial- 
ity for her (and I, for my part, believe that 
many more things took place in that sad 
affair than the worthy Moorish officer ever 
knew of) ; why, Miranda was even very kind 
to Caliban, and we may be pretty sure for 
the same reason. Not that she would en- 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 341 

courage him in the least, the poor uncouth 
monster, — of course not." Shakespeare and 
Thackeray looked differently at women. 

Thackeray lacked the poet's eye ; he could 
not see and was not troubled. 

c< Ahi quanto nella mente mi commossi, 
Quando mi volsi per veder Beatrice, 
Per non poter vedere, ben ch'io f ossi 
Presso di lei, e nel mondo felice ! " 

But poor Thackeray was never near the ideal, 
and never in paradise. Some critic has said 
of him that because he had Eden in his mind's 
eye, this world appeared a Vanity Fair. No 
criticism could be more perverted ; he had 
Vanity Fair in his mind's eye, and therefore 
could not see paradise. 

This treatment of women is half from 
sheer ignorance, and half from Thackeray's 
habit of dealing in caricature with subjects 
of which he is ignorant. He behaves toward 
foreign countries very much as he does to- 
ward women. France, Germany, Italy, ap- 
pear like geography in an opera bouffe. 
They are places for English blackguards to 
go to, and very fit places for them, tenanted 
as they are by natives clad in outlandish 
trousers, and bearded and mustachioed like 



342 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

pards. Of the French he says : " In their 
aptitude to swallow, to utter, to enact hum- 
bugs, these French people, from Majesty 
downwards, beat all the other nations of 
this earth. In looking at these men, their 
manners, dresses, opinions, politics, actions, 
history, it is impossible to preserve a grave 
countenance ; instead of having Carlyle to 
write a history of the French Eevolution, I 
often think it should be handed over to Dick- 
ens or Theodore Hook. ... I can hardly 
bring my mind to fancy that anything is 
serious in France, — it seems to be all rant, 
tinsel, and stage-play/' His attitude toward 
French literature is distorted by lack of sym- 
pathy to an astonishing degree. 

Thackeray's fault was not merely a certain 
narrowness of mind, but also that he allowed 
himself to see only the grotesque and disa- 
greeable, until habit and nature combined to 
blind him to other things. 

VI 

Thackeray is not a democrat. Democracy, 
like many another great and vague social 
conception, is based upon a fundamental 
truth, of which its adherents are often igno- 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 343 

rant, although they brush against it in the 
dark and unwittingly draw in strength for 
their belief. The fundamental truth of de- 
mocracy is that the real pleasures of life are 
increased by sharing them, — that exclusive- 
ness renders pleasure insipid. One reason 
why democracy has prevailed so greatly is 
that everywhere, patent to everybody, in the 
simplest family life, there is proof of this 
truth. A man amuses himself skipping 
stones : the occupation has a pleasure hardly 
to be detected ; with a wife it is interesting, 
with children it becomes exciting. Every 
new sharer adds to the father's stock of de- 
light, so that at last he lies awake on winter 
nights thinking of the summer's pleasure. 
With a slight application of logic, democrats 
have struggled, and continually do struggle, 
to break down all the bastions, walls, and 
fences that time, prejudice, and ignorance 
have erected between men. They wish to 
have a ready channel from man to man, 
through which the emotional floods of life 
can pour ; 

" For they, at least, 
Have dream'd [that] human hearts might blend 
In one, and were through faith released 
From isolation without end." 



344 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

The brotherhood of man, however, is not 
a week-day matter; men are brothers only 
in brief moments of poetry and enthusiasm; 
at other times they are unneighborly enough. 
The course of our civilization (so we are pleased 
to designate the aggregate of our incivil 
ways and habits) has helped the separation 
of man from man, not without excuse. Hu- 
manity has had a hard task in civilizing itself; 
in periods of ignorance, ill humor, and hun- 
ger it has built up a most elaborate system, 
which has been a great factor in material 
prosperity. This system is the specialization 
of labor, which serves to double the necessary 
differences among men, and to make every 
specialty and every difference a hindrance to 
the joys that should be in commonalty spread. 
The age of machinery has increased special- 
ization, specialization has increased wealth, 
wealth is popularly supposed to be the pana- 
cea for human ills ; and the bars and barriers 
between men have been repaired and strength- 
ened. Specialization in Thackeray's time was 
in the very air ; everything was specialized, — 
trade was specialized, society was specialized, 
money was specialized; there was money made, 
money inherited from father, money inherited 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 345 

from grandfather, — money, like blood, grow- 
ing purer and richer the further back it could 
be traced. Every act of specialization pro- 
duced a new batch of social relations. 

To this elaborate system of specialization, 
and to its dividing properties, Thackeray is 
very sensitive. He has no gift for abstrac- 
tion ; he does not take a man and grow 
absorbed in him as a spiritual being, as a 
creature in relations with some Absolute ; he 
sees men shut off and shut up in all sorts of 
little coops. He is all attentive to the coops. 
The world to him is one vast zoological 
garden, this Vanity Fair of his. He is not 
interested in the great concerns of life which 
make men cleave to one another, but in the 
different occupations, clothes, habits, which 
separate them into different groups. A de- 
mocrat does not care for such classification ; 
on the contrary, he wishes to efface it as 
much as possible. He wishes to abstract 
man from his conditions and surroundings, 
and contemplate him as a certain quantity of 
human essence. He looks upon the distinc- 
tions of rank, of occupation, of customs and 
habits, as so many barricades upon the great 
avenues of human emotions ; Napoleon-like, 



346 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

he would sweep them away. He regards man 
as a serious reality, and these accidents of so- 
cial relations as mere shadows passing over. 
This is the Christian position. This is the at- 
titude of Victor Hugo, George Eliot, George 
Sand, Hawthorne, Tourgenef, Tolstoi, Char- 
lotte Bronte. 

No wonder that Charlotte Bronte made 
this criticism upon Thackeray's face : " To 
me the broad brow seems to express intellect. 
Certain lines about the nose and cheek be- 
tray the satirist and cynic ; the mouth indi- 
cates a childlike simplicity, — perhaps even 
a degree of irresoluteness, inconsistency, — 
weakness, in short, but a weakness not una- 
miable. ... A certain not quite Christian 
expression." This is a true likeness. Thack- 
eray was not a Christian. He acted upon 
all the standards which Christianity has pro- 
claimed to be false for nearly two thousand 
years. He had a certain childlike simplicity. 
Some of his best passages proceed upon it. 
Take the chapters in " Vanity Fair " where 
Amelia is neglected by Osborne, or the scene 
at Colonel Newcome's death. These inci- 
dents are described as they would appear to 
a child. The impressions seem to have been 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 347 

dinted on the sensitive, inexperienced mind 
of a child. This quality is Thackeray's 
highest. He is able to throw off the dust 
of years, and see things with the eyes of a 
child, — not a child trailing glory from the 
east, but one bred in healthful ignorance. 

Walter Bagehot, in his essay on Sterne 
and Thackeray, compares the two, and, after 
describing Sterne's shiftless, lazy life, asks, 
What can there be in common between him 
and the great Thackeray, industrious and 
moral? Bagehot found that the two had 
sensitiveness in common. There is another 
likeness, — a certain lack of independence, a 
swimming with the stream. Thackeray has 
an element of weakness ; it appears contin- 
ually in his method of writing novels. He 
puts his character before you, but he never 
suffers you to consider it by yourself ; he is 
nervously suggesting this and that ; he is 
afraid that you may misjudge what he con- 
ceives to be his own correct moral standard. 
He points out how virtuous he really is, how 
good and noble. He keeps underscoring the 
badness of his bad people, and the weakness 
of his weak people. He is like a timid 
mother, who will not let her brood out of 



348 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

sight while any one is looking at them. 
Moreover, his satire never attacks anybody 
or anything that a man could be found 
publicly to defend. He charges upon social 
malefactors who are absolutely defenseless. 
He belabors brutality, avarice, boorishness, 
knavery, prevarication, with most resounding 
thwacks. 

In the year 1847 " Vanity Fair" was pub- 
lished. Thackeray won great fame as the 
terrible satirist of society. And what did 
society do ? Society invited him to dinner, 
in the correct belief that it and Thackeray 
agreed at every point. We think that such 
satire betrays a certain weakness and lack of 
courage. Did the Jesuits invite Moliere to 
dinner after "Tartuffe"? 

Thackeray's face had, according to the 
criticism we have quoted, " a weakness not 
unamiable." Certainly Thackeray was not 
unamiable ; he must have been most lovable 
in many ways. The childlike characteristic 
to which we have alluded is enough to prove 
that ; and in chapter after chapter we find 
evidence of his human kindliness. Take, for 
example, the passage quoted by Mr. Merivale, 
in his somewhat pugnacious Life of Thacke- 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 349 

ray, from Titmarsh's letter on Napoleon's 
funeral at Les Invalides. Here is a descrip- 
tion of an English family in three genera- 
tions, a somewhat foolish family, perhaps, 
given with some affectation, but perfectly 
genuine in its sympathy with childish hopes 
and fears. His books are full of passages of 
a like character. If further evidence were 
needed, Mrs. Ritchie's prefaces to this new 
edition supply it most abundantly. 

VII 
A novelist, however, in the end, must be 
judged according to a common human mea- 
sure. This the novelist, like other men de- 
voted to special pursuits, resents ; he inter- 
poses a claim of privilege, and demands a 
trial by his peers. He claims that as a man 
he may be judged by Tom, Dick, and Harry, 
but as a novelist — in that noble and sacro- 
sanct capacity — he is only within the juris- 
diction of men acquainted with the difficul- 
ties and triumphs of his art. This is the 
old error, — the Manichean heresy of trying 
to divide the one and indivisible into two. 
It reminds one of Gibbon's " I sighed as a 
lover, I obeyed as a son." It is the char- 



350 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

acter of the novelist that provides tissue for 
his novels; there is no way by which the 
novelist can sit like an absentee god and pro- 
ject into the world a work that tells no tales 
of him. Every man casts his work in his 
own image. Only a great man writes a great 
novel ; only a mean man writes a mean novel. 
A novel is as purely a personal thing as a 
handshake, and is to be judged by a simple 
standard which everybody can understand. 

There has been a foolish confusion of 
nomenclature, due to the desire of critics to 
make a special vocabulary for themselves, 
partly to the end that they may be known 
to be critics, partly to shut themselves off 
into a species of the literary genus that shall 
be judged only by members of the same 
species. Hence the silly words u idealism " 
and " realism." Maupassant says : " How 
childish it is to believe in reality, since each 
of us carries his own in his mind ! Our eyes, 
ears, noses, tastes, create as many different va- 
rieties of truth as there are men in the world. 
And we who receive the teachings of these 
senses, affected each in his own way, analyze, 
judge, and come to our conclusions as if we 
all were of different races. Each creates an 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 351 

illusion of the world for himself, poetical, sen- 
timental, gay, melancholy, ugly, or sad, ac- 
cording to his nature." This is a correct 
statement, but it does not go far enough. 
The world not only looks different to differ- 
ent people, but, as it is the most delicately 
plastic and sensitive matter imaginable, it is 
always tending to become for any commu- 
nity what the man in that community with the 
greatest capacity for expression thinks it is. 
Like an old Polonius, the city, the village, or 
the household sees the world in shape like 
a camel, or backed like a weasel or a whale, 
according as the prince among them thinks. 
Consider a fashion in criticism or in dress. 
Sir Joshua Reynolds admired Annibale Car- 
racci, and all the people who looked at pic- 
tures, in very truth, saw beautiful pictures by 
the great, glorious Annibale. A group of 
dressmakers and ladies of quality in Paris 
wear jackets with tight sleeves, and every 
city-bred woman in France, England, and 
America sees the beauty of tight sleeves and 
the hideousness of loose sleeves. 

Strictly speaking, everything is real and 
everything is ideal. The world is but an 
aggregate of opinions. The man who sees 



352 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

an ugly world is as pure an idealist as he 
who sees a glorious orb rising like the sun. 
The question for poor humanity is, Shall the 
earth shine or float dead and dull through 
eternity ? Every man who sees it golden 
helps to gild it ; every man who sees it leaden 
adds to its dross. 

Shall we look with Miranda ? 

" O, wonder ! 
How many goodly creatures are there here ! 
How beauteous mankind is ! O brave new world, 
That has such people in 't ! " 

Or with Timon ? 

"All is oblique; 
There 's nothing level in our cursed natures, 
But direct villany." 

The novelist is on the same standing-ground 
as another; only he has the greater influ- 
ence, and therefore the greater responsibility. 
This world and all which inherit it are a 
dream ; " why not make it a nobler dream 
than it is?" 

Before this great act of creation, the petty 
details of the novelist's craft — plot, story, 
arrangement, epigram, eloquence — drop off 
like last year's leaves. These details will 
always find individuals to study them, to ad- 
mire them, to be fond of them. They will 



SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 353 

have their reward, they add to the interest 
of life, they fill the vacant niches in the rich 
man's time, they embroider and spangle. 
They quicken our wits, stimulate our lazy 
attentions, spice our daily food, help us to 
enjoy; but they must not divert our attention 
from the great interest of life, the struggle 
between rival powers for the possession of the 
world. It is a need common to us and to 
those who shall come after us, that the world 
suffer no detriment in our eyes. We must 
see what poets see ; one cannot help but dog- 
matize and say that it is base to believe the 
world base. We need faith ; we cannot do 
without the power of noble expectation. 

" Is that Hope Faith, that lives in thought 
On comforts which this world postpones, 
That idly looks on life and groans 
And shuns the lessons it has taught ; 

" Which deems that after threescore years, 

Love, peace, and joy become its due, 

That timid wishes should come true 

In some safe spot untouched by fears ? 

" Or has he Faith who looks on life 

As present chance to prove his heart, 
As time to take the better part, 
And stronger grow by constant strife ; 



f 



713 



354 SOME ASPECTS OF THACKERAY 

" Who does not see the mean, the base, 
But sees the strong, the fresh, the true, 
Old hearts, old homes forever new, 
And all the world a glorious place ; 

" So bent that they he loves shall find 
This earth a home both good and fair, 
That he is careless to be heir 
To all inheritance behind ? " 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Sept. 2007 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
(724)779-2111 



LIBRARY OF 



021 716 908 2 




m 






I 



